That Arab Arms Deal

The Bush administration’s plan to give arms to Arab nations isn’t entirely daft – with the right weapons they can reduce their exposure to Iran. The bad news is that this tells us the administration has decided not to take out the Mullahs’ nukes.

The deal (my ellipsis):

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the formal launch of discussions over the package for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, as well as 10-year military aid plans with Israel and Egypt, in a statement ahead of her departure for the Middle East on Monday afternoon. Israel is slated to get $30 billion and Egypt $13b.; the latter will also receive additional economic aid…

(Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns) added that the arms would be “for defensive purposes – most of it.”

But even if “most of it” is defensive, that just means the Egyptians and Saudis have to get their offensive equipment from Russia – which will be easier since the US is providing its own equipment for free.

Defenders of the plan say neither Egypt nor Saudi Arabia have committed themselves to wipe Israel of the map. But that’s most likely because these Islamic dictatorships lack the capability, not the intention. And anyway, intentions change much more quickly than capabilities – for example through Iran-style regimes taking over.

The big ray of hope is the corruption level of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which have CPI scores of 3.3, as bad as China. So much of the US aid will end up in Swiss bank accounts rather than weapons.

And what money does filter through to weapons won’t be much of a threat to Israel unless Iran manages to take out its nuclear shield with a first strike.

That brings us to the depressing conclusion. If the administration were seriously planning to take out the Mullahs’ nukes, it wouldn’t need this initiative at this time, since without nukes the crumbling Iranian economy threatens no one (except the Brit Navy).

If a strike were planned, this aid package would be deployed after the attack, to sooth Arab sensibilities.

Doing it now means no strike is intended and so the next war in the Mideast will be nuclear.

America Can’t Trust Gordon Brown

Some Americans believe Gordon Brown remains a sturdy ally of the US. But he’s not, and the US should now bracket the UK with Germany and France.

Here’s the NY Sun:

It was good to hear President Bush confirm yesterday what many of us have considered an abiding truth in a treacherous world, that Britain and America maintain a special relationship. Gordon Brown, the new prime minister, in Camp David for his first visit with Mr. Bush, leaned on the words of that warrior for democracy Winston Churchill in expressing that we have come to be this close because of our “joint inheritance of liberty, a belief in opportunity for all, a belief in the dignity of every human being.”

But Brown plans to cut and run:

Gordon Brown prepared the ground yesterday for the withdrawal of British troops from the frontline in Iraq.

The Prime Minister tried to redefine the relationship between Number 10 and the White House when he made clear that he would retain control of the timetable for British withdrawal regardless of America’s involvement…

Mr Brown made clear that the decision on when British troops would be pulled out of Basra – and security handed to their Iraqi counterparts – would be based purely on the advice of British military commanders on the ground.

Winston Churchill did not base national policy on the views of generals – if he had we might well have lost WW2.

In fact Brown is busily integrating the UK with the EU – hence his dropping his party’s commitment for a referendum on the revived EU Constitution, which he knows Brits would reject.

Brown backs the EU because he’s a micro-manager with lousy judgment – exampled by his selling the Brit gold reserves at the bottom of the market. The EU is infested with people sharing these character defects, so it’s Brown’s natural home.

Of course he may have duplicated our analysis and decided that if the US is going isolationist, he might as well cut the link first. But that’s dumb – the American people might well decide that staying engaged with the world is their least bad option. In that case they stay in control of a world in which the UK has assumed weasel status.

Without US help and submerged in Europe, the Brits will be helpless to prevent their nation becoming just another Russian satellite.

None of which is to suggest the US reciprocates and cuts its many business, intelligence, and procurement ties with the UK.

But Americans should not trust Gordon Brown.

Man Made Warming (1)

It’s quite possible that global warming is a man-made measurement artifact.

Our earlier post on poorly sited sensors turns out to be backed by an organization that’s working its way through each US monitering station. It’s audited 222, and has about 1,000 to go.

Here’s a sample:

Here is a well maintained and well sited USHCN station:

Here is a not-so-well maintained or well sited USHCN station:

This site in Marysville, CA has been around for about the same amount of time, but
has been encroached upon by growth in a most serious way by micro-site effects.

The GW skeptic John Daly made this suggestion 7 years ago:

The only way surface data can be used with any confidence is to exclude all town/city and airport data – no exceptions. Only rural sites should be used, and by `rural’ is meant strictly `greenfields’ sites where there is no urbanisation of any kind near the instrument. Even when greenfields stations are used, those which are technically supervised (eg. managed by scientists, marine authorities, the military etc.) should be treated with greater credibility than those from sheep stations, post offices and remote motels.

It’ll be interesting to see how many of the US stations pass this sensible test.

A later post will deal with the massaging this data is subjected to after it has been collected from these poorly managed sources.

Smart Terrorists

It’s wrong to sneer at the incompetence of Brit terrorists. – they’ve manipulated the Brit government into derailing London’s position as a global financial center.

The derailing:

There was a 1.8 per cent year-on-year fall in passenger traffic at Heathrow in June and a 1.2 per cent fall in the first half of this year, according to BAA.

Air traffic has been growing annually at over 10%, so Heathrow just lost over 1 in 10 of its customers in a year – quite an achievement.

That’s because it treats its passengers like dirt, and now the Brit government is worried:

London’s status as one of the world’s leading financial centres risks being undermined by excessive delays at Heathrow and the airport’s sprawling layout, the new City minister warns on Monday…

In frank criticism that reflects mounting government concern, she voiced fears that multinational companies could question the rationale for holding annual or other important meetings in London. “I want multinational companies to feel really confident about housing their annual general meetings here,” she said…

She said of the airport: “You spend so much time being processed. That’s the issue… passports, security, just the layout of the buildings which makes it more difficult.”

But her government has decided on a perimeter protection security policy that treats every traveler as an equal threat and reacts solely to past attacks rather than anticipating the future.

That approach leads to cumulative security measures – after each attack another hole has to be plugged, at the cost of more delay to travel. But terrorists adapt, and since there are many ways to bring down an airliner, and most are currently not screened for, travelers now know that they face ever-increasing delay and harassment.

There’s a much better way – summarized here by the President of the (US) Airline Pilots Security Alliance, hat tip Bruce Schneier:

…we should be starting with defending the smallest spaces — the cockpits and cargo compartments, and working outward to the limits of our resources; instead of starting with the airport perimeter and working inward, ignoring the actual defense of those spaces that are actually the terrorist targets.

Heathrow’s problem is that a reputation, once lost, takes many years to recover. That’s because people remember bad experiences much more vividly than good ones, and prioritize their own direct experiences and those of people close to them over inputs from third parties.

Now every business in London knows that Heathrow is a lousy business airport, and they’ve adapted to that.

Thus frequent travelers like us Gandalfs have made quite big changes to our life plans to avoid traveling to the UK by air – we expect our upcoming trip there will be our last one by air. After that it’s rail – if that gets intolerable too, we’ll just disinvest from the UK.

So those terrorists – with their match-ignited shoe bombs, non-functioning liquid bombs, and wrongly rigged detonators have successfully tricked the Brit government into undermining the Brit engine of growth.

They did this by learning from their predecessors. The IRA’s successful bombing of London’s financial center in April 1993 immediately brought the Brit government to the negotiating table.

Al Qaeda has avoided the need to smuggle huge truck bombs into the City of London.

That’s smart.

What Happens Next?

Two weeks off line helps clarify the issues we face – here’s a somewhat depressing laundry list

The US

The US is the engine of the world’s growth and its military guarantees the freedoms of Europe and Israel.

However it is now sliding to isolationism because its people, assiduously misinformed by their MSM, want to retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan. And the American democracy usually ends up doing what the people want.

Withdrawal will trigger the same horrors that followed the abandonment of South Vietnam – but this time the sufferers will include Americans.

That’s because the Vietnam war was a containment action against China and Russia, and US withdrawal just ceded the peoples of a few small and poor nations to Communist tyrannies.

But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are against foes sworn to destroy the US, and fleeing the battlefield will embolden them to resume their attacks on the US, which with its open southern border is highly vulnerable.

If, as is probable, those enemies inflict mass casualties on American soil, the US, having abandoned offense will move to defense – finally building those border fences. And it can do that – it’s is quite capable of feeding and equipping itself, and gets almost all of its oil domestically, from Canada, and from Mexico.

So from a US viewpoint, isolationism is fine – Americans will be safer and get richer.

But China will lose its biggest customer, Europe and Israel their protector, and Africa its benefactor.

The EU

The EU is a confederation of nations which, with the sole exception of the Brits, have spent the last century losing wars. So, not surprisingly, their only diplomatic weapons are those of the defeated -subterfuge and appeasement.

Thus, instead of using force to recover their hostages from Libya, the EU used bribery:

During a meeting with Col Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Mr Sarkozy agreed to help the country with a nuclear-powered project to desalinate seawater…

Mr Sarkozy’s visit to Libya and the nuclear deal both came immediately after the release of six Bulgarian medical personnel and one Palestinian, all of whom had been sentenced to death for allegedly infecting hundreds of children with HIV.

Desalination is commonly used here in the Southern Med, and the fuel used is, er, Libyan oil:

Libya is Africa’s major oil producer and one of Europe’s biggest North African oil suppliers…Libya has proven reserves of 29.5 billion barrels of oil and a production capacity of 1.4 million barrels per day. Italy, Germany, Spain and France account for 74% of Libya’s exports.

So this has nothing to do with desalination, and everything to do with nukes.

The Libyan dictator gets a package that will burn French enriched uranium to produce plutonium. Just add a nuclear waste treatment plant, and Voila! – he has nukes.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t matter – he’ll just use them to bully the Southern EU. But it sets a precedent for the EU’s existential foes. Its fast-growing Islamic communities will be emboldened to extend their de-facto Sharia zones, and the Russians will leverage their oil and military to take control of the EU’s economy.

So the EU, like all weak empires, won’t make it.

The Brits

If Brits follow the precedent of the 1930s, they’ll eventually get fed up with appeasing the EU and the UK’s un-assimilated minorities.

But it’s hard to judge how the pampered kids one sees on London streets would deal with the privations their grandparents faced – bombing, rationing, mass death.

And if the Brit worm is to turn, it’ll need a shock – a big recession, high unemployment, a deeply unpopular government, and a decent alternative.

Still, all of those are quite likely now, so on balance the Brits seem likely to survive the wreck of Europe.

Israel

Israel faces an existential war sometime soon.

But it currently has very weak political leadership and is under massive pressure from the US (and constant whining from the EU) to cede the West Bank to Fatah’s kleptocratic killers. If that happens, all of Israel will be open to attack by the most ancient rocket, since said killers would be just 12 miles from Tel Aviv.

With the West Bank ceded Israel has zero defensive depth so the next war is bound to be nuclear.

If Israel gets better leadership, and its weapons industry delivers, and its kids decide to fight, then that war will be won.

But with fading US backing, it will be a close run thing.

****

Otherwise, things look great.

The Flash MSM

I just switched to Opera from Firefox, briefly experiencing the online MSM without Flash blocking. It was a horrible experience that illustrates why the MSM won’t make it online.

Firefox just started randomly consuming about 60% of my CPU – quite an achievement with a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo. It happens when more than 10 tabs are open, and the latest version doesn’t fix it. Since WinXP has a crappy scheduler, 60% CPU utilization locks the system up, so Firefox has been retired.

Raw Opera doesn’t have a Flashblock plugin, so for a few minutes I experienced the online MSM as the providers intend us to.

The Israelis are worst – YNet News and the Jerusalem Post each have no less than four very intrusive moving ads on their home pages. These, besides engendering a hatred for the advertisers, make it quite impossible to concentrate on reading the content. Mind you, dealing with this level of distraction must battle-harden Israelis.

So I switched to the sober Financial Times. It has just one Flash ad, but it’s large and twitchy, and that makes it very hard to concentrate on reading the text.

Fox News is the least bad of the 20 or so sites I reviewed. It had no moving ads on its home page, and no more than one small one on second tier pages.

Anyway, I quickly hacked Opera’s Cascading Style Sheet to suppress Flash.

I can’t imagine anyone finds moving ads anything less than unpleasant, and a lot of people won’t know how to suppress them.

Maybe this is a cunning ploy by the MSM to force people to pay for their content. If so, they’re doomed – harassing your customers makes them walk away, not do what you want.

Opera is quite fiddly to use with WordPress, so I hope Firefox fixes itself quickly.

The Heat!

We just returned to the Southern Med from Italy, and can report that the weather in both places is quite normally hot.

The Brit MSM reports otherwise:

While much of Britain is still under floodwater, raging fires across southern Europe burned out of control yesterday…

Thousands of people across southern Europe have been displaced by fires triggered by persistently high temperatures and, in some cases, possible arson. Some of the blazes are so huge they are visible from space…

In Italy there were suggestions that many of the fires in the past week were lit by arsonists and the Mafia.

We went all over Italy, and saw not a single out of control fire – just the odd singed field that’s normal at this time of year. And our Mafiosa friends will be deeply  wounded by these libellous claims that they would abandon their altruistic peacekeeping activities and stoop to burning fields.

Those Brit floods resemble those a few years back when Climate Change visciously focused on new housing developments with names like “Meadow Valley” and “The Lakes”. Thus, this time:

Towns vulnerable to floods

ABINGDON

Flooded by river: 570 properties so far, mainly in south-west of town. More expected.

Why: Abingdon sits on the confluence of the River Thames and River Ock. South-west Abingdon is built on the flood plain on a neck between the two rivers. Both rivers have severe flood warnings.

Defences: No man-made defences. 10,000 sandbags.

Peak flood: Late Wednesday. Similar capacity to January 2003 flood.

Peak flood: Late Wednesday evening, but will remain high for several days. Peak will be similar height to January 2003 floods.

Still, help is at hand (my ellipsis):

Water bills will have to rise to pay for flood-proofing towns and cities, the head of the Environment Agency says today, as forecasters warn of further flash floods over the weekend…

(She adds that) the country must act now to protect itself from the impact of climate change, which will make flooding a regular event.

So now all those folks can build in floodplains, secure in the knowledge that someone else will pick up the tab. Economists call this moral hazard.

Anyway, returning to the Southern Med, we found a flier from the local government waiting on the doormat. It asks us to save the planet by jogging to work and turning the central heating down 5 degrees.

It’s 98 degrees.

Islamofascist Boom Box

Courtesy the Gandalfette, here’s a video illustration of the relative competence the West and its enemies.

(Hat tip to Shining full plate and a good broadsword).

The Next War

Mrs G is taking me on a mystery vacation, so to pass the time here’s a rerun of our 2-year-old forecast of  the consequences of appeasement.

Historically, war and disaster are the rule not the exception, so there’s no reason the destructive forces roiling our modern world won’t put the lights out in the traditional way.

This was written in 2005. The only incorrect prediction so far is the Eurotrash got to Wolfowitz earlier than predicted (15).

Part 1: Decline and Fall

Here’s what an America-hating President Hillary Rodham might do after election in 08

1. President Rodham agrees to extend NAFTA to form an American Union (AU) with Canada and Mexico, progressively ceding sovereignty on defense, foreign policy, the environment, taxation and most law making. EU President Tony Blair provides constitutional guidance.

2. Vigorous counter-AU-laws are passed in all red States, but these are ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. Republican attempts to impeach the Supreme Court fail. The Court rules these attempts unconstitutional and the offending Congressmen and women are themselves impeached and removed from office.

3. The leaders of the 3 nations appoint an AU Commission, with power to develop and impose Directives across the AU, subject to broad guidelines set by the 3 leaders.

4. The 3 leaders nominate Bill Clinton as President of the AU Commission. This keeps him out of the White House.

5. The AU Commission chooses Montreal for its headquarters. Thousands of female interns flee to Europe but are forcibly repatriated.

6. Justifying her order withdrawing all US forces from abroad, President Rodham declares “the end of phallocentric muscular foreign policy“ and disbands many military units, including the USMC.

7. The first Commission Directive makes citizen gun ownership illegal in the AU. US guns are collected with the help of Mexican and Canadian armed forces. Dan Rather, at the helm of a newly invigorated CBS, reports that this proceeds peacefully, and cites authentic letters from Americans celebrating their new freedom from guns.

8. To ensure democratic legitimacy, an AU Congress is established, with 626 representatives elected by the 3 member nations in proportion to their populations.

9. The location of the AU Congress rotates on a 6 month cycle between Montreal and Cancun. The latter ensures that Mexico gets some of the ample hospitality spending by AU Congresspeople (each of whom gets an annual $400,000 tax free, unaudited expense account).

10. For the purposes of AU Congress elections, the US is divided into 11 Administrative Regions (ARs). The AU Commission appoints Jimmy Carter to the thankless task of defining the US ARs. They turn out to be quite complicated.

11. In line with the EU, Americans elect their AU Congresspeople using the d’ Hondt system. Party officials in each AR create Party Lists of candidates so voters just need to select their Party. Purists object to this transfer of power to the activists that control the Party Lists, but the NYT calls it “a minority-friendly simplification”. Since the AU Congress has little power, opposition is muted.

12. The AU Commission appoints war hero John Kerry as Defense Minister, where he starts the delicate process of merging the armed forces of the 3 nations. For safekeeping, he transfers all US military records to vaults in Montreal and cleanses them of “unnecessary” material.

13. An AU Supreme Court is created with absolute power to overrule the judiciaries of the 3 nations. Selected members of the old US, Canadian and Mexican Supreme Courts are elevated to the AUSC. After a surprise win in the lottery for naturalization as an American citizen, the international sage Kofi Annan is appointed first chairperson of the AUSC.

14. The Commission mandates an AU Arrest warrant, which enables law enforcement agencies in each of the 3 nations to arrest people in the other 2. So Canada and Mexico can arrest US citizens in the US, take them to their own countries and try them for crimes under Canadian or Mexican law. This includes trying them for acts which would not be crimes under US law.

15. A number of Bush Neocons are arrested and taken to Canada and tried for offenses under recently-enacted Canadian War Crimes laws. Arrested felons include Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton. The seat vacated by Wolfowitz at the World Bank is filled by Pascal Lamy of the EU.

16. Under an early AU Directive, the US signs up to Kyoto Protocol (2), and work starts on dismantling the remnant of the US manufacturing base and reducing its power generating capacity by 50%. Power rationing begins across the US with the exception of Maryland, Northern Virginia, Boston and Manhattan.

17. China successfully conquers Taiwan, after destroying its defenses with nuclear weapons, at the cost of 3 million lives. Australia and Japan protest, but AU President Clinton describes the action as “a necessary crackdown”.

18. Following pressure from a resurgent Russia, the AU enters negotiations to return Alaska.

19. IRA-style uprisings by Hispanics opposing US rule begin in California, Texas, and New Mexico. Insurgents are tacitly supported by Mexico, which provides sanctuary and weapons. After pressure from her AU partners, President Rodham declares that the US has “no selfish interest” in these states. Negotiations on Mexican/US power sharing start under an EU mediator.

20. Iran demands that all Jews vacate Israel. President Rodham joins with Jane Fonda to ask the Israelis to “give peace a chance”. After Israel refuses, Iran detonates nuclear weapons over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, killing 40% of Israelis. France obtains a UN resolution demanding Israelis show realism and depart, and threatens them with French nuclear forces.Surviving Israelis execute Operation Masada, destroying 32 Arab cities and Paris.

21. Oh, and ex-Senator Joseph Biden is appointed AU Anti-Corruption Czar with a big office in Montreal.

Part 2: Fight Back

22. In preparation for the 2012 election, the FCC rules that blogs are political speech and so regulated by McCain-Feingold. Google, stating that it will “Do No Evil”, shuts down Blogspot. The ABA threatens the remaining blog hosting services with class actions for the recovery of damages for “fundamentalist hate speech”. On legal advice, these services shut down. The remaining right-wing blogs move their services and in some cases themselves to the democratic refuges of Australia, Iraq, Afghanistan and, after its revolution, to the UK.

23. The Canadian Supreme Court rules in favor of the “honor killing” of a Canadian Muslim teenager by her brothers for walking in public with a fellow male student. The CSC finds the killers innocent, on the grounds that they were were following the dictates of Islam’s ‘divinely ordained justice’.

24. Elsewhere, the US Supreme Court rules that the First Amendment rights of bloggers have not been curtailed, pointing out that they can always be employed by “proper” media. Following this ruling, many lefty bloggers are hired by the revitalized MSM.

25. By 2012, all members of the earlier Bush administration are either in Canadian jails, or at the Hague facing the International Court of Justice, together with over 10,000 other former members of the US military indicted by that court for war crimes. The Republican challenge to President Rodham is mounted by ex-Governor Mark Warner of Virginia, running with Colin Powell.

26. Rodham wins, although only 35% of voters go to the polls. Dimocrats gain control of both houses.

27. British military units that fled to the US to escape the Blair purges of 2005-2007 return to the UK to participate in the revolution.

28. UN Secretary General Mugabe is the first to welcome Rodham’s election and her commitment to “add another 18 floors to the UN building”.

29. Shortly after the election, a 10 year old muslim girl is hanged from a cherry picker in a Toronto shopping mall for “moral crimes against Islam’s divinely ordained justice”. The child has been raped by an uncle, and their mother supported the execution. Canadian shoppers ignore the incident, but Australian, British, Japanese, Afghan and Iraqi public opinion is outraged and demands reference to the AU Supreme Court.

30. Sitting in emergency session, the AUSC rules the executions unlawful, since they violate the “right to privacy” of the executioners and their families. The Court further rules that in future, within the AU, such executions should take place privately, using the traditional penalty for adultery. Felons should be buried up to their breasts and then stoned using stones that “should not be large enough to kill the woman by one or two strikes, nor should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones”. To deal with the execution of children, the Court changes the reference to “breasts” to “6 inches below shoulders”. It further requires that such executions take place in recognized holy places and that felons should be sedated with morphine.

31. The ACLU pronounces satisfaction with a verdict that “respects religious diversity”. Spokespersons from the Canadian and US womens’ movements also voice support, saying “this is all about the mother’s right to choose, and she chose death for her child before dishonor. We respect her choice”.

32. In 2013, the Department of Commerce reports that the US economy has shrunk by 45% since 2008. Unemployment is at 25% and the Dow is at 3000. Social conditions resemble the Great Depression. President Rodham promises a “New Deal”.

33. Canadian police arrest two 13 year old girls in San Jose, CA and take them to Canada for trial and execution by the Islamic community – the children had been forced by their relatives to work as prostitutes. The NYT opines in an article headlined “It Takes a Village” that “The rioting in San Diego reflects the persistent racism of American people”. They conclude that “The Israeli destruction of the nations and holy places of Islam demand atonement by the American people”.

34. Mass emigration begins to Australia and the newly liberated UK.

35. British and Australian media report serious insurrections in California.

36. The talks on the restoration of Alaska following the “one-sided US purchase” drag on. As a gesture of good faith, the US dismantles its Alaskan BMD. Russia demands compensation for all the oil pumped under US occupation, and the US concedes this in principle.

37. The Hispanic insurgency in the 4 border states grows, following the suppression by the Border Patrol of attempts by local citizens to “illegally take the law into their own hands”.

38. In early 2014, the nation mourns the death of ex-President Carter. While officiating at Groundhog Day he is savaged to death by Punxsutawney Phil. The assailant is shot by the Secret Service. London’s Sun tabloid publishes pictures of the savaging under the headline “Gotcha”. The UK and US mutually withdraw their ambassadors, and the UK suspends aid shipments.

39. By 2015, unemployment reaches 40%. Power rationing is extended to Manhattan, causing the infamous “Gucci Riots”.

40. In early 2005, Condoleezza Rice dies of dehydration in a Canadian prison, after the courts decide that she would not wish to survive following a coma induced while in custody.

41. In a speech widely reported around the world, but not in the US, ex-Governor Schwarzenegger says:

“People have no jobs. That’s bad. Children are being killed. That’s bad. Our borders are wide open. That’s bad. Our Courts and Lawmakers are out of control. That’s bad. This is not the America I came to and that was so good to me. We should take America back”.

Following a series of uniquely Californian electoral maneuvers, Schwarzenegger is re-elected Governor. His first action is to close the borders with the rest of the US.

42. Other states follow to form the Greater US Union, and the Second Civil War begins. This time, Mexico and Canada are engaged. After 3 bloody years, the death of 5 million people and the destruction of Washington DC, Ottawa, Mexico City and Los Angeles, the Greater US Union prevails.

43. The Greater US includes the 5 western provinces of the old Canada plus the northernmost former Mexican states. Britain adopts the Eastern former Canadian provinces. Quebec is ceded to the Indian tribes on condition that it is available as a Moonbat Reservation (see below).

44. At a constitutional convention in Philadelphia, delegates agree a number of constitutional amendments to limit the socially destructive forces that brought ruin upon the nation. These include:

- All candidates for electoral office should either have hard science or engineering degrees (the Maggie clause), or have run a real business (the “W” clause), or have served their nation in harm’s way in the police, military or firefighters (the Ike clause).

- Candidates from professions centered on dishonesty are excluded from office, notably lawyers and some journalists and accountants.

- Candidates if either married or civil-unionized must still live with their first partner.

- The judiciary is reformed, with term limits of 8 years and the requirement that all judgments shall be made by a jury. All current judges must stand for re-election.

- Tenure is criminalized in all professions.

- The federal tax take shall be via a flat tax, not to exceed 15%.

- Paid lobbying is made illegal.

- No foreign quasi-government entity shall be located in the Greater US.

- English is made the official language of the Greater US, and citizenship or residence requires fluency.

- The state religion of the Greater US is defined as Christianity. All other religions are encouraged, provided that they do not violate Christian behaviors.

- Citizens unwilling to abide by the new Constitution are to be transported to new Moonbat Reservations, where they will subsists on social security, but not allowed to re-enter the Greater US.

- A review of all laws made under the Dimocrats that violate the above is to be carried out, and offending laws are struck down.

45. The new capital city is established in Minneapolis, approximately the center of the Greater US.

46. The UN HQ is transferred to Sudan, in spite of serious rioting by high-end New York restaurateurs. (The Wold Bank and IMF have already been vaporized with Washington, and re-headquartered in Aberystwyth, Wales).

47. Following adoption of these resolutions and a Republican landslide, President Schwarzenegger visits Moscow in Air Force II (a stretched B-2 bomber, fully loaded). After a private conversation with Czar Putin, both announce that Russia has renounced all claims to Alaska.

48. The Greater US withdraws from NATO and forms the center of the Anglosphere Defensive Alliance with the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and free South Africa. Virgin Anglo, the Rutan/Branson sub-orbital airline, starts services between the US, the UK, India and Australia, with maximum journey times of 2 hours.

49. Moonbat Reservations are created in Cancun and its surroundings; parts of the former Quebec; and, by British agreement, in Tuscany Italy. Heart rending scenes follow, as members of the former regime and its supporters are electronically tagged and shipped out to perpetual irrelevance.

50. The US economy expands to its 2008 size within 5 years, and becomes the largest in the world within 10.

51. The world is at peace, for a while.

Germans Should Be Nervous

The German Chancellor spent last month being beastly to the Poles, on the assumption that Poland needs the EE and Germany more than vice-versa. Now Poland is the only buffer between Putin’s tank armies and Germany, that  doesn’t seem so smart.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has sent a chilling message of defiance to the West, effectively tearing up a vital Cold War treaty designed to guarantee peace in Europe…

Mr Putin signed a decree suspending Moscow’s participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, a move that will allow Russia to mass tanks on Europe’s border for the first time in 15 years.

A Russian invasion of Western Europe won’t happen anytime soon.

But history is often driven by capabilities not intentions, and the Russian army will now position itself on Poland’s frontier.

Poland is quite poor, so not worth having. But Germany would be a real plumb for Russia – 80 million very competent, obedient and defenseless Germans would provide a great basis for the Russian economy when the oil runs out.

And now a disgruntled Poland is all that stands between Russia’s tank divisions and Germany.