BEFORE WE SHOW THE UNITED NATIONS THE DOOR
….we should secure their file cabinets.
Yes, I believe this entire institution should either be torn down to the ground, or at least moved to Zimbabwe where delegates’ and their staff’s double-parking tickets and towing charges will be the least of their worries. I can no longer find any redeeming quality in the United Nations, witness the role their WHO played in nearly destroying the only extant “free economy” in the world.
Since modern corporatism came around in the 70s and 80s it became obvious that modern bureaucratic “slot fillers”, or “apparatchiks” as the Soviet designers called them in their half of the world, regardless of educational specialty; engineer, medicine, science, law, business, or even the several professional oaths they pledged to their craft; the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind, as does the Scientific Method, both of which carried an almost religious sense of duty and loyalty to their practitioners…
…all those pledges of allegiance by professionals simply are routinely demoted down several rungs on the loyalty totem pole. Fourth or fifth place, tops, replaced by higher loyalties all having to do with their membership in the Organization; rank, authority, money, power. All human seductions which their craft requires them to subordinate to the craft. (A little Masonic lingo there.)
False piety is common among all professions, the legal profession most sticking out in my mind because of its close relationship to the political class, and one in which I was engaged. But the rise of the “government bureaucracy class” who indeed receives all its compensations rank and power, from the people who pay them, and they ostensibly answer to has become a somewhat different matter, since we are seeing a general revolt of this bureaucracy class in the United States primarily because, for the first time in nearly a century, they have seen a president, the national executive, who, by law they answer to, seem to be speaking for the people who elected him rather than the preferred paymasters, the Congress.
This conflict has bee a long time brewing. This has been a subject I write about often, and will continue to write until, as some ancient mathematician once said, “Something gives.”
I only want to remind Americans of the obvious, that what is relatively new in America, an authoritarian bureaucratic government class, has been the rule, in form or another, since the Middle Ages. The United Nations, formed in 1946, is only its latest iteration, the United States the sole holdout to naked authoritarian government.
Today I am writing about the UN and its agencies, and to tell you that locked in those 70 years worth of case files in their file cabinets is not just proof of political high crimes against humanity, but also thousands of solutions to regional and community hunger, poverty and environmental degradation in the Third World (they consider rural Louisiana to be Third World, btw) for the simple reason that finding a cure for those things would mean they are no longer needed.
The European governments, to a great extent including England, all are driven by command economies and authoritarian governments in which the “political process” is the over-ruling credo that manages all the others.
It would follow that the United Nations would reflect this world view of their European betters, foreswearing all professional allegiances to law, custom, truth, justice, the will of the people, even microscopic evidence, if need be, to pursue the higher Good of the Organization.
This short piece is only about those “file cabinets” and what they probably contain in dozens of UN “development” agencies. I last worked with them in the 1980s, when in fact there were still file cabinets. I assume they have been microfiched or digitized by now, and squirreled away in some repository, much like where my, and my father’s, and his father’s military records are stored.
(It’s a curious thing, but bureaucracies have an indecent passion for record keeping, causing the apologists for both the Nazis and Soviets-style government a great deal of discomfort. Still, it’s a clue of what they store away.)
The lone holdout, America, is listing more heavily to port these days, so the continued existence of the United Nations plays a major role is what the New World Order was always meant to look like, for the United Nations is the designated “trustee” (with more than one meaning, if you know anything about plantation rank and file and among the slaves) of all those nations, much like the poor Black Americans who always voted Democrat for three generations, but still, “the sun has riz, the sun has set, but here I am in Detroit yet”.
If you only knew how many life-and-village-saving, and culture-enhancing ideas the United Nations has funded, from inventions to practices, then, once proven, simply put those reports away in a file cabinet (I’m still writing from the 1960s here) never to be seen again, and then turn around and fund still more projects to develop yet another better way I never-ending cycle.
It is clear the United Nations is not about making lives better, but rather to “attend to the business of making lives better” ….forever.
So, about those file cabinets…
…inside them you will find evidence of some of the most heinous crimes against humanity imaginable, the global warming hoax probably the least among them. WHO, the World Health Organization, is just the most recent “outed” bugaboo in this pit of indifference, for in both their reaction and reporting of worldwide Corona-virus it’s clear that the health and welfare of any member state’s population, whether the Congo or Italy, are no more than 3rd down their list of priorities of the things they most want to protect and defend.
You will find the cures for many of the economic woes of the Third World. But I repeat myself.
Let me explain this with a story:
In the late 80s I was approached by an old friend who ran a left-of-center poverty law institute. He in turn had a friend at a state law school who wanted me to meet a scientist…so I drove up there to see them.
Now this scientist/inventor was a real genius, but insufferably arrogant, with the manners of a kid still in knee pants. But he had “invented” a process of incalculable value, to my mind, so I listened.
It was a fuel. This was the period, if you will recall, of worldwide famine, from Ethiopia across the breadth of the Sahel in Africa, to the floodplains in Bangladesh, mostly caused by man-made deforestation.
In both Africa and the subcontinent, deforestation was associated with tribal peoples killing living bushes and shrubs, which held the soil, for cooking fuel after all the dead wood had been used up. Sort of like Congress, they were mortgaging tomorrow for a hot bowl of soup today.
Even into the 90s I still saw village women in Europe, in the Balkans, carrying rushes of deadwood some times from a mile or two, only, while the labor was hard and the foraging often at long distance, their wood supplies were renewable to point, for each year they could take down trees to season through the winter.
If you don’t know know, cooking fuel requires a low b.t.u. fuel, and wood best suits it. Coal burns too hot, and charcoal is too expensive. Just a few 1-inch logs, 8″ or so long, brought to white hot, and you can have a good hot meal for four.
As you may guess, every time you pull up a live bush, there is less to hold the soil, causing flooding downstream, or in Africa, to hold back an encroaching desert.
My mad scientist friend had found a cure; both the end-use product and the process. He designed a kindling/log-sized piece composed of waste coal (with a very low b.t.u) plus biomass and an entrained solid gas similar to Trioxane used in military field cook stoves.
What a wonderful solution I thought. My mind immediately dashed all over the world where variations of this products could be used, from sea level to 10,000 feet up.
Only how much would it cost, per tonne, per unit? And who, other than AID agencies would buy it? The technology was already there to produce in volume.
So I quickly drafted an R&D plan in my mind, figuring two years to get some field results and then market those results to the right international aid groups. I knew of various technologies in Kentucky being tried with coal gasification, and knew a company in New Jersey that currently had the contract for military fuel pellets.
All we needed was enough product to do some field tests at various altitudes, in order to establish b.t.u. parameters, and my scientist friend said he could produce 200-300 pounds in his lab.
Then came the hard part. Dr Strangelove thought he was going to be brazillionaire, and I told him, no, more like a cubanaire, for profit margins had to be kept to the 2%-3% range inasmuch as the end users (the word’s poorest people) would never be the ones paying for this fuel, and if they had to pay, they’d keep on cutting down live shrubs for free. Moreover, with some past knowledge of getting goods off the docks in Mombasa, I figured 25% minimum of pilferage, even under UN supervision…if the product was any good at all.
Well, my mad scientist would have none of that, and we fought and fought…very LOUDLY…for over a month, while I was also trying to find $25,000 to run three field tests…one in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, another in the Himalayan foothills, and a third in the Sahel.
I finally talked Dr Strangelove down to 3%, and began trying to shop the idea. I was a listed consultant with the UN, as well as 2-3 other regional development banks, but finally decided to by-pass the United Nations, for reasons I will outline shortly, for that is the punchline to this story.
Instead I tried some of the private sector NGO’s like OXFAM and Bandaid. This was before the internet, so I had to send out individual letters. I actually got a reply from Bandaid in London (a pretty good outfit for awhile) and was asked to call a lady named Jenny Penden, or Penny Jenden (I can’t recall) who, when she picked up the phone, sounded like Lulu in “To Sir With Love”.
At $4.00/min I explained what I had already cited in the letter, and all the wondrous things we could do to stop deforestation, and save lives and fragile eco-systems, and Miss Penden-Jenden just cooed. I explained that all we needed was USD 25,000 to conduct field fuel efficiency tests at various altitudes. And then, to cap off the deal, which I thought was well in hand, I mentioned that I had even talked the inventor of the process down to a 3% profit margin. I could hear a deep sound of sucking air on the other end, and Miss Penden-Jenden asked, “You mean this is a for-profit venture?” Why yes, why do…but before I could say Mick Hensley, she said
“Bandaid can’t be involved in any venture that shows a profit.” And she hung up.
So, you’re asking why didn’t I go to the UN in the first place? Or at all?
For one, the UN, while a very for-profit organization, if you know what I mean…(remember Kofi Annan’s son did quite well with the Oil for Food Programme a few years later)…does not take a shine to private for-profit companies. Rather, it prefers non-profit NGO’s with “Assistance, Children, Aid”, or something like that in the title, and you must still know someone who knows someone just to get a good idea heard. And you must be able to speak baksheesh in at least forty languages, including braille.
But while everyone understands a crook, it may be more difficult to understand the overall UN world view…the bureaucratic, grant-award world view, where quite frankly, the research is more important, and certainly more profitable, than the solution.
In my research of this new fuel (I subscribed to a lot of Leftie mags in those days, one in particular, South, a great source if you could just wade through the Marxist doggerel) I ran across a report by two midwestern profs about the cooking culture of the Sahel. They had received a nice UN grant for a 2-3 year study of stove manufacturing in tribal areas up around Timbuktu, at the big crook when the Niger River turns south.
They had designed some new stoves they felt would fit into the local manufacturing culture, so as not to put local potsmiths out of business, but which were about 30% more fuel efficient. Men after my own heart. I talked to one of them, can’t recall which, and asked if the stoves were really that good, then explained the fuel I was working on.
So, where can I get some of these stoves? When will the stoves be inserted into local economies?, I asked. Oh, probably never, he said. First, our report has to go out for peer review, which lasts at least two years, and there is always a lot of beard-stroking, and nay-saying among academicians around the world. No matter how much we try to advance-guess those “what-if’s” one never can. It’s all a kind of game.
“Projects like these actually never go into production.”
So, why don’t you just take the design and put it into the public domain? Oh we can’t do that. First, we agree by contract not to. We even have to turn over our field notes. Part of the contract. They own everything. We get a nice stipend and get written up. It’s a resume enhancement.
The point is, we can study a problem, and the pay is good, but if we ever fix that problem, dozens of other scientists and researchers will lose their chance at a grant later on..
He said this without even a hint of sarcasm or remorse.
Oh, well.
At least when we ask where Yassar Arafat learned to keep his Palestinians sick, hungry, uneducated and poor…so as to keep them strapping bombs around their waists, we’ll know where he learned it.
Donald Trump (but never a Democrat) could form a small agency with a 10-year to do nothing but go through all those projects from the UN’s file cabinet, up to the day it closes up shop, under the guarantee that we won’t prosecute a single one of them, including their European conspirators, if they will turn them over peaceably. (Or we can do it the other way, and storm the place, but also line them all up and shoot them, is we’re forced to do that. No, just kidding.)
But with those file cabinets, inside another 10-years, and a different kind of Peace Corps, he-we can turn those all sorts of communities into better places. Just think about it.
Just get those files, Mr Trump, and come up with a plan. Call it the “UN After-Action.”
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VASSAR BUSHMILLS
Contact: VassarB@gmail.com Twitter: BushmillsVassar
Books: Famous Common People I Have Known and Other Essays
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