But wait! That’s the UN, not WHO.

Indeed, grasshopper.

Stand by for a bit of history, perspective, integration, and dot-connecting devoid of wingnut conspiracy stuff. Serious and sober; but funny if you catch the drift. Reserved for my besties. Wait until I connect the League of Nations and…wait for it…The French Revolution.

…I read a really good piece today, courtesy of Mike Eades’ The Arrow. It’s funnily entitled “real james bond villains wear cardigans.” It’s not the sort of piece you just pick a money quote from, as the whole integrated piece is the point. It’s an all-or-nothing thing.

I’ll launch this over one particular paragraph though (the guy uses zero caps ever).

we’re talking about taking one of the most corrupt, captured, and incompetent agencies in the history of bureaucratic bloviation and giving them the keys to the world crisis machine and to an electronic health passport that will be your right to travel and work and eat out and shop and who knows what else. this is the cornerstone of an international social credit system. wait until they add your ESG score and your carbon footprint.

…Oh, first, here’s WHO’s headquarters…Geneva, Switzerland, I believe.

Marginally less impressive than the United Nations… I love how the exposed concrete floor joists resemble classic air-conditioning units hanging outside 3rd-world high-rise apartments. So retro… All they need is some laundry hanging out the windows. Perfection attained!

The punchline, first, is that The World Health Organization is doing what bureaucracies simply do. Always. Chief amongst their talents is to up-play-then-downplay, shift narrative, deny all fuck-ups, reiterate their essentialness, assert that it would have been worse, and call for an expansion of their budget, power, and influence.

Bureaucracy 101. Experts at polishing their own turds.

Let’s get into my particular angle on this….

Everyone has heard the phrase League of Nations. Few amongst us are at least lay persons of serious historical interest (though I know I have a lot amongst my besties, here). It’s a bit surprising to know, however, that its purposes appear to be the same—pre-Great Depression and pre-WWII—as we hear echoed daily by children-savants-on-smartphones like NEW IDEAS!!! …100 years later.

The League’s primary goals were stated in its Covenant. They included preventing wars through collective security and disarmament and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration. Its other concerns included labour conditions, just treatment of native inhabitants, human and drug trafficking, the arms trade, global health, prisoners of war, and protection of minorities in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations

Good thing all those goals were fully achieved over the last almost exactly 100 years… I mean, how ridiculous would it be to argue that even one marginal improvement was achieved, ever? Oh, right…IT WOULD HAVE BEEN WORSE!!!

You’d think that with that utter failure, obvious on the heels of WWII, there might have been self-reflection, perhaps tinges of honesty… Nope! League of Nations was such an abject failure that the obvious course was to double down, stock in trade of bureaucracy. We’ll call it…wait…UNITED NATIONS!!!

The UN was established after World War II with the aim of preventing future wars, succeeding the rather ineffective League of Nations. On 25 April 1945, 50 governments met in San Francisco for a conference and started drafting the UN Charter, which was adopted on 25 June 1945 and took effect on 24 October 1945, when the UN began operations. Pursuant to the Charter, the organization’s objectives include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development, and upholding international law. At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; with the addition of South Sudan in 2011, membership is now 193, representing almost all of the world’s sovereign states.

The organization’s mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades by the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies. Its missions have consisted primarily of unarmed military observers and lightly armed troops with primarily monitoring, reporting and confidence building roles. UN membership grew significantly following widespread decolonization beginning in the 1960s. Since then, 80 former colonies have gained independence, including 11 trust territories that had been monitored by the Trusteeship Council. By the 1970s, the UN’s budget for economic and social development programmes far outstripped its spending on peacekeeping. After the end of the Cold War, the UN shifted and expanded its field operations, undertaking a wide variety of complex tasks.

The UN has six principal organs: the General Assembly; the Security Council; the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC); the Trusteeship Council; the International Court of Justice; and the UN Secretariat. The UN System includes a multitude of specialized agencies, funds and programmes such as the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Additionally, non-governmental organizations may be granted consultative status with ECOSOC and other agencies to participate in the UN’s work.

The UN’s chief administrative officer is the secretary-general, currently Portuguese politician and diplomat António Guterres, who began his first five year-term on 1 January 2017 and was re-elected on 8 June 2021. The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states.

The UN, its officers, and its agencies have won many Nobel Peace Prizes, though other evaluations of its effectiveness have been mixed. Some commentators believe the organization to be an important force for peace and human development, while others have called it ineffective, biased, or corrupt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations

To be fair just a bit, the UN’s possible decent role was one of hosting a rather neutral territory during the US-Soviet cold war on the heels of WWII and continuing through all the “dustups” in Korea, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, et al. I honestly don’t know whether that hurt or helped in terms of deep analysis, but I do know that we didn’t shoot nukes at each other or get into direct conflict. The US and Soviets fought via puppets in theaters, including the dirt-ass-poor Chinese communists. Not great, but, IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE!!!

…First time I’ve used that bromide where I feel it’s probably right.

But the UN has since been kind of a joke, at least to my impressions according to my age. It seemed they held pretty decent influence and swager up until the end of the Cold War. That’s when the elephant left the room and the bureaucrats were left twiddling thumbs and so as they do, they set about to no longer solve or contain problems that do exist…they set about to create problems where none exist otherwise.

My last recollection of an influential UN was in the runup to the 1st Gulf War, GHW Bush at the helm, 1991. If you recall, Iraq simply annexed Kuwait and proclaimed it their 19th province, or something. Bush went to great lengths to get UN accordance before moving in.

(…Aside, I was the navigator of the French Navy ship Colbert—a guided-missile cruiser—at the time and spent 3 months in theater for Gulf War I.)

That corresponded with the parallel of the USSR collapsing rapidly. I believe it was New Year’s Eve day, 1992, when the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics rose over the Kremlin for the last time.

…In retrospect, it was a glorious time, filled with genuine feelings of a better world ahead…for everyone…including Russians, et al. Problem was, it was hugely bad for lots of corporations….

IT WAS BAD FOR YOUR 401K!!!

…Well, thank God the .com boom came along a bit later and fixed your investment portfolio right up. Until it stopped.

…Another quick aside. When I lived in Japan in the late 80’s my Jap GF at the time had a dinner party. She was an antiques dealer in Tokyo and had lots of usual suspects as friends. During the course of the evening, I talked a long time with a Japanese trader-guy for Merrill Lynch. He said one thing to me I never forgot, and all my experience since affirms he’s right.

“MONEY MUST MOVE!!!“

…Whether it’s trading current holdings for other holdings, creating transactions with fees, underwriting new issues of stocks or bonds, or acquiring, et al, the money must always be on the move from one thing to another. This is an essential, base principle of money and it’s a key to why it has evolved from commodity-based (like gold or other commodities) to fiat based (managed journal entries).

See? I told you no conspiracy nonsense.

Crtypto is a push-back against that it’s worth understanding, but beyond my scope for this…

…The repeatable fabulousness of all bureaucracy globally is that it always does exactly the same thing and you can catch them at it and it never makes a fuck of a difference. I think the phenomenon calls for more study.

Envision this.

Quite arguably the WHO has presided over the worst human disaster in all of history. I know lots of people think it was wonderful. They’re not right…principally…inside their own heads.

What to do? There is no real accountability at high levels since the Nuremberg Trials where convicted were hanged.

The Nuremberg executions took place on 16 October 1946, shortly after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials. Ten prominent members of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany were executed by hanging: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Julius Streicher. Hermann Göring was also scheduled to be hanged on that day, but committed suicide using a potassium cyanide capsule the night before. Martin Bormann was also sentenced to death in absentia; at the time his whereabouts were unknown, but it is now thought that he committed suicide while attempting to escape Berlin on 2 May 1945.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_executions

On the other hand, how many of those names—aside from Hermann Göring—are familiar to you?

Is my essential and fundamental point becoming clearer without conspiratorial easy-lazy-just-so-crap?

There will never be another Nuremberg where they got ten “bureaucrats.”

It’s quite a LOL if you think about it and if you think deeper than that, you come to realize that nothing new is going on. That’s why nothing is a conspiracy; it’s all baked into the cake of the way things are done and have been for well over a hundred years.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Tigrinya: ቴዎድሮስ አድሓኖም ገብረኢየሱስ; born 3 March 1965) is an Ethiopian public health researcher, and official who has been Director-General of the World Health Organization since 2017. Tedros is the first African in the role, and was endorsed by the African Union. He played a role in the response to both the Ebola outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before serving as Director-General, he held two high-level positions in the government of Ethiopia: Minister of Health from 2005 to 2012 and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2012 to 2016. Tedros was included in Time‘s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

I’d forgotten how much of a mainstay Ethiopia is on the world stage and geopolitically important. I’ve not been there, but spent a week in neighboring Djibouti once—which I characterized as the armpit of the world…but that’s a story for another time.

It’s all just moving money.

…There’s little need of doing any accounting for WHO’s performance during their declared pandemic, after changing the definition and criteria of what constitutes a pandemic from rational to butt-plug perversion-serving. That’s a LOL in itself. Look it up. (nobody got hanged for that).

…Two years down the road of the litteral biggest fuck-up in global history, and WHO is polishing turds.

But, dispense with so much work doing that and just haul out a shiny new-thing object.

EVERYBODY SUPPORTS THE NEW THING!!!

The new thing is a WHO Constitution (look it up). Member countries sign on, and when a global health crisis next emerges, their global constitution supplants all member-nation constitutions and they take central control—from that awesome structure in Geneva, pictured above.

Who decides when it’s a global health crisis?

You guessed it!

…As I said, funnier than and SNL skit when SNL was good.

To sum up, I almost wish it would come to pass…that everyone signed on, including USA. I know it won’t happen, but indulge my fantasy that it does.

Let’s refresh and requote first.

we’re talking about taking one of the most corrupt, captured, and incompetent agencies in the history of bureaucratic bloviation and giving them the keys to the world crisis machine and to an electronic health passport that will be your right to travel and work and eat out and shop and who knows what else. this is the cornerstone of an international social credit system. wait until they add your ESG score and your carbon footprint.

Mind worm this. Given a perfect interconnected global database flawlessly linked to an app on a smartphone everyone holds and takes with them everywhere…HOW MANY POINTS OF FAILURE???

Hundreds of thousand, if not millions. It makes me fucking giddy to think about all the fucking failure, every fucking day; and damn, you’re dashed from even eating a sandwich at your favorite place when fuckin’ hungy.

Perhaps a hard sell for me to put this out, but just think about it. Billions of phones with a specific global WHO app connected to billions of point-of-access WiFI and cell tower, then through myriad global networks with millions of routers and servers, all the way to a distributed database that in turn must have near real-time data from myriad points of input for vaccination, health updates, and whatever they dream up next to keep the sheep baaaaing.

The biggest target for cyber attacks ever. Your bank account will finally be safe.

Fuck, I’d have a mind to ditch it all, get my hacker-cracker ducks in a row, refresh my UNIX-shell skills, and go to work for the fun of it.

Take out WiFi in an airport, cancelled flights, watch the wave.

Take out something in a whole region…transportation, services, communication and because nobody can “check in” with their virtue-signalling phone app, it’s mị̀ dị̂ (ไม่ได้)—’can not’ in Thai—and it fucks everyone up and it’s all over the globe, daily.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious schadenfreude?

It would almost be worth the whole thing for me. No, not ‘almost.’ I’d laf my ass off, no matter how much the hardships shed off onto me. I’m willing to starve to see morons starve. I’m adept at fasting for longer than normal periods of 18-24 hours. I’ll got 40 days and delight in watch billions of morons suffer.

I’m serious. Take that for what you will, but I don’t lie and that sorta substantiates it.

I think that’s up to about the worst I can muster for this post, so until the next…

…Oh, wait! The French Revolution. I only went back to WWI and such, here. Didn’t expound on why The French Revolution is the seed and root of basically all the BS we and all of our recent forbearers have endured.

I’ll have to get to that one of these days.

If you understand that and say “of course,” you may be a true lay historian.