Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The United Nations, progenitor of a thousand agencies, has released a report called “MOVING TOWARDS A CLIMATE NEUTRAL UN” regarding its success in reducing its own “carbon footprint” (full version , summary). The Head Prophet of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, has revealed the mysteries to us unwashed masses as follows:
We are making steady progress. In March, the main UN website launched a new section offering a wide range of information on the Organization’s sustainability performance. In April, I opened the new UN building in Nairobi – a beacon of sustainable construction. In May, a new position – UN Senior Advisor on Sustainability – was created to coordinate the Secretariat’s work on climate neutrality. In August, I presented the UN21 Award to the UN Environment Programme and the Department of Field Support for their efforts to green the UN. And in September, senior officials of the inter-agency Environment Management Group approved a Strategic Plan for Sustainability Management in the UN system.
The United Nations system is strongly committed to leading by example and ensuring that our operations are continuously monitored and improved – not just in terms of what we deliver, but also how we deliver.
Figure 1. A sheep contemplates the UN report whilst providing natural fertilizer for the flowers.
That all sounds wonderful … now, let’s parse his claims.
Here are the successes that he highlights:
1. The UN website launched a new section of its website, called “Greening the Blue“. It seems to be dedicated to the proposition that if you can’t do it yourself, you should tell others to do it.
2. A new UN building in Nairobi, Kenya, has 6,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof, and is rated (not measured but rated) at 515 kilowatts of power. No word on the cost, but it looks like a bureaucrat’s palace …
3. They have created a new bureaucratic position, “UN Senior Advisor on Sustainability”, at the usual high rate of pay and perks. This is in addition to their existing positions, such as the “Senior Advisor on Sustainable Development”, and the “Technical Advisor,Population & Sustainable Development”, and the “Advisor on Sustainable Water Development and Management”, and the “Second Committee Advisor on Sustainable Development”, and the “Consultant, Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development”, and …
The Senior Advisor post has been filled by a woman named Julie MacKenzie. Prior to this position, she had been an Environmental Management Coordinator and Climate Neutrality Advisor” for the FAO and an “Adviser” of an unspecified flavor for the UNEP. I cannot find a biography … classic faceless bureaucrat.
4. Mr. Ki-moon handed out a prize to one of the UN programmes for being really really good guys.
5. They put together a “Strategic Plan”, which is no doubt very strategic, and probably chock-full of brilliant plans.
6. He said that the UN is committed to leading by example … do you feel better now?
You may notice that in all of that, Mr. Ki-moon neglected to point out how much the UN has reduced their CO2 emissions …
…
…
… and there is a very good reason for him saying nothing about that:
UN CO2 emissions in 2009: 1.7 million tonnes.
UN CO2 emissions in 2010: 1.8 million tonnes
So if they didn’t reduce their emissions in the slightest, what did they do?
Well, they held a photo competition looking for “images reflecting the theme ‘Visions of a sustainable UN’ “. Here’s the winner:
That works, shut the lid and be done with the UN, sounds eminently sustainable to me …
w.
PS—There was one other achievement noted in their report, viz:
Once again, the UN office at Geneva invited hundreds of sheep to graze the grasslands surrounding the Palais des Nations. The sheep cut the grass in an ecologically sustainable manner whilst providing natural fertilizer for the grass and flowers to grow in spring.
“Whilst”? Who says “whilst” these days? In any case, trust the UN to boast about inventing animal husbandry …
Oh, if only the garbage truck had turned up at just that moment…
Hi Willis
Probably “Mr Ban”, rather that “Mr Ki-Moon”.
Next will be a position for “Senior Advisor on UN Sustainability Positions”, and then, “Coordinator of UN Senior Sustainability Advisors”, and then …
Maybe global warming is cause by these insufferable UN a***holes boiling taxpayer’s piss with their profligate nonsense?
A great big “Oh, how very impressive” goes out to the folks at the UN for this very impressive effort.
I mean it.
Really.
You believe me, don’t you?
The UN are behind the game. Australia has just launched an 8 year program to make sheep farming ‘sustainable’.
http://qcl.farmonline.com.au/news/state/livestock/cattle/target-100-up-and-running/2505182.aspx
They need to appoint a UN Senior Advisor on Sheep Grazing Sustainability.
If it were not for US (and other) sovereignty issues, one could simply let the UN bloviate about this until the cows come home. However, those issues exist, so we must pay attention and resist where necessary. Thank you, Willis, for keeping up with the nonsense.
Willis
If ‘Whilst’ is good enough for the Shepherds watching their flocks at night its good enough for me, whilst bringing in another sheep reference. Can the day get much better?
tonyb
By the way, the gent in the beard helping to stuff the UN flag into the bin looks uncommonly like Dr Mann as drawn by Josh
tonyb
Uhhhhh — maybe I stayed up too late last night, but is that James Hansen at second from left?
No?
Damn…
How ironic, that their vision of a sustainable UN sees four out of five people consigned to the trashcan!!!
Meanwhile they are happy to promote this kind of ‘sustainability’ on an annual basis –
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6736517/Copenhagen-climate-summit-1200-limos-140-private-planes-and-caviar-wedges.html
Utter hypocrites!
Thanks Willis for this nice example of the way how bureaucracies work: design a committee to address the “problem” talk about it, add more resources to it, develop new more complex rules, add new hierarchy. Each senior advisor evolves and needs direct reports, his staff to produce reports to discuss and analyse and in the meanwhile nothing happens but increase costs except some window-advertising activities.
I only ask myself how did they brought those sheep to those grasslands, not sure how the location is… and then if many people used those pastures for a picknick after…
Actually, in Sydney CBD the Banksters say “Whilst” quite often.
Example-
“Whilst Gillard’s Carbon Tax will result in her party’s ruination in the next election, we can make tons of money off the scam until then.”
Just a quote heard near St Martins Place.
The UN is a big government. Like all governments, it does nothing for any reason other than to obtain and maintain power and control over resources and people and its ranks are populated by the worse amongst humanity.
I keep wondering who gives the order to set up such positions, panels, conferences etc.
Or do they just get carte blanche to do as they please?
These people have to be stopped, but how?
And, in relation to their wish for leading by example, why the need to get immunity prior to any action? Is that a good example? To run away from responsibilty and accountability?
It’s such a big joke, but I can’t laugh.
Can we compare the CO2 released by transporting a load of sheep from a farm to a city centre then home again, and that released by having a guy on hand with a lawnmower?
I say “whilst” these days.
Mr Ban indeed.
Mr Ban the light bulb , Mr Ban the coal , Mr Ban my car , Mr Ban the ban, bee-bop-a-loola , the Kim Ban moon.
Many folks who support the UN do so on the basis of its making a real and positive difference to the world. They should be the ones most concerned by this. Why?
It does not matter what the policy might be. If there is no focus on getting the best results for the least input, then you are not only failing in the objective, but also potentially blocking others who could do a better job. This is particularly the case when the focus and effort can shift from actually doing something positive, to persuading others that you are doing something positive, or even to appearing to be supporting the message. So those who truly believe in the peace-making central mission of the UN, can join with the true believers in CAGW and the majority who are sceptical of the hype in saying token gestures, expensively made, should be stopped.
Willis asks: ““Whilst”? Who says “whilst” these days?”
I answer: Me… certainly whilst (oops!) writing. Do a quick search through the 78 thousand (I think I remember you reporting that number) words in you autobiography-in-progress (which I am looking forward to immensely); and let us know if it appears?
The photo competition is a wheeze. If that one won ….
Here we have green bins for recyclables, that blue one must a UN special livery for recycling worn out bureaucrats.
Apparently their idea of sustainable means being able to sustain their jamboree parties long after the supposed threat of thermagedon has be proved to be a total fallacy.
Setting up a 100bn slush fund with no legal accountability or oversight must take a lot of sustaining.
“I presented the UN21 Award to the UN Environment Programme and the Department of Field Support for their efforts to green the UN”
I presume he is referring to “Agenda 21” ? – If so, I assume their “efforts” involve planning mass de-population???
What exactly does the U.N. do?
In April 1993, the United Nations declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica in the Drina Valley of north-eastern Bosnia a “safe area” under UN protection. On July 11 — some 1700 men, disproportionately the elderly and infirm, were separated from women and children. The peacekeepers “stood inches away from the Serb soldiers who were separating the Muslim men, one by one, from their families” (Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 306). At Serb command, the Dutch drew up a registry of 242 Bosnian men remaining in the camp, again mostly elderly and infirm. Then they handed the men over to the Serbs. Not one of the 242 men is known to have survived. The Red Cross lists 7,079 dead and missing at Srebrenica. Other estimates range as high as 8,000 or 10,000.
The United Nations itself has recently released reports documenting two of its worst stumbles. According to these confessions, U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda stood by as Hutu slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsi. The United Nations has accepted the findings of a damning report which accuses it of failing to prevent the genocide in Rwanda more than five years ago. The UN failed the people of Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. An independent inquiry team – headed by former Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson – said the UN had ignored evidence that genocide was planned and had refused to act once it had started. The inquiry concluded that the UN should apologise to the Rwandan people. In response, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed bitter regret and promised action to prevent another such disaster. A Rwandan presidential spokesman said Mr Annan should come to Kigali in person to apologise.
United Nations Operation in Somalia II (UNOSOM II) was the second phase of the United Nations intervention in Somalia, from March 1993 until March 1995. UNOSOM II carried on from the United States-controlled (but UN-sanctioned) Unified Task Force (UNITAF), which had in turn taken over from the ineffectual United Nations Operation in Somalia I (UNOSOM I) mission. All three of these interventions were aimed at creating a secure enough environment for humanitarian operations to be carried out in the increasingly lawless and famine-stricken country.UNOSOM II had a strength of 28,000 personnel, including 22,000 troops and 8,000 logistic and civilian staff[5] from Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Botswana, Canada, Egypt, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Kuwait, Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Spain, South Korea, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the USA and Zimbabwe. On July 12, a house where clan leaders were meeting was attacked by US AH-1 Cobra helicopters. Several buildings were destroyed and many Somalians died. When four western journalists went to investigate the scene, they were beaten to death by a Somalian mob. The journalists were Hansi Krauss of Associated Press and Dan Eldon, Hos Maina and Anthony Macharia, all of Reuters.[11]. Somalis that had been disappointed by the failure of the UN to disarm the warlords in Mogadishu actually began to support those same warlords in an “us versus them” mentality. On October 7 in a nationwide television address, President Clinton “effectively ended the US proactive policy in Somalia” and “called for the withdrawal of all US forces no later than March 31, 1994.” Resolution 954, passed on November 4, extended the UNOSOM mandate for a final period until March 31, 1995. American soldiers completely withdrew on March 3, 1994, 28 days earlier than expected.[14] Other nations, such as Belgium, France and Sweden, also decided to withdraw at this time. On November 4, 1994, after “peacemaking” efforts by the 1,900 UNOSOM II troops failed, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) voted unanimously to withdraw all forces in Resolution 954. On November 16 the UNSC authorized Resolution 897, placing new emphasis on peacemaking and reconstruction and returning to a less reactive role. UNOSOM II’s mandate ended in March 1995 when US ships off the coast of Somalia assisted in the safe departure of the remaining UNOSOM troops. In early 1994 the Security Council set a deadline for the mission of March 1995.[14] The withdrawal of UN troops from Somalia was completed on March 28, 1995.
If a boat is hole in the water into which you throw money, what’s the UN?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/claudiarosett/2011/04/08/magic-with-u-s-money-for-the-united-nations/
A hole into which your “elected representatives” (and their appointees) throw your money.
Definition of a “Ban”
an answering machine in sleep mode !
“Sounds wonderful” And right there is the problem isnt it? They live in a bubble of their own self importance and bloated self opinion unable to comprehend how normal people see them. What goes through their minds when they come out with such vacuous smug trash? Of all the problems the planet faces this ridiculous PR self promotion by a handful of highly paid holier than thou hypocrites should come bottom of the list by a country mile. These many and various non jobs filled by like minded parasites intent on justifying their positions are rapidly multiplying like weeds in a field, the more of these corporate lickspittles there are the more they try and justify their own existence on the backs of others.
“Senior Advisor on Sustainable Development”, and the “Technical Advisor,Population & Sustainable Development”, and the “Advisor on Sustainable Water Development and Management”, and the “Second Committee Advisor on Sustainable Development”, and the
“Consultant, Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development”, and …
Does the UN really need these jobs and will the planet be worse off without these jobs? What do they do that is important to ordinary people? There are thousands of highly paid non job gravy train riding parasites infesting the UK regime, they have no discernible function other than to channel funds to clients of the regime who can be relied upon. Value for money has been ditched as an ethos in the rush to squander as much money as possible on as many useless jobsworths and paperclip shufflers, it reminds me of my trip to the old USSR. At a time when women are being murdered and abused and mutilated around the world we see money used for the gravy train.
Wouldn’t the UN cease to function and therefor exist if they were carbon neutral?
It’s an interesting concept “carbon neutrality” to a more intelligent person it means death.
hmmm
1 What is the carbon footprint of thousands of computers surfing the internet to find “Greening the Blue” and then spamming all your friends and encouraging them to do the same?
2 What is the carbon footprint the construction a new building compared with refurbishing an existing building? A 2 bed cottage is 80 tonnes according to the guardian, so multiply by 1689.000495, carry the 3, square the hypotenuse, add date of birth – 67,4746 Gt of CO2 for a new building (approx – maths isn’t my subject)
baa baa
Willis, you missed the biggest saving:
Everyone knows that economy class passengers use less fuel than 1st class, don’t they?
So good to see our money being so well spent.
I missed something. What the heck is climate neutrality? The only thing that seems sustainable is limitless supply of BS from the UN and the growth of bureaucrats in new and wonderful positions.
Of course I sort of lost interest when these wise people started telling me that they could control the climate.
When they come for the MONEY…we’ll all be fleeced.
Sorry, baaaaaaaad joke. (OK, OK, let’s get serious – don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes!
But remember, with a UN “Peace Keeper” force, “Sheep may (NOT) safely graze…”
Max 🙂
They should have used Geese, you get a more even sward and better “fertilizer” – it waters straight in. Sheep Poo on the other had is mostly undigested fibre which takes for ever to degrade. That is why they can build businesses like this (http://www.creativepaperwales.co.uk/) out of it.
There’s that weasel word again:
‘Sustainability’
We need to genuinely be aware. The warmists are shifting the goalposts (yet again).
Because the globe is resolutely refusing to warm at an astronomical rate (maybe even cooling), the hotspot can’t be found, and all the ‘missing’ heat has gone to hide in the oceans, the watermelons have just re-named their cause so that they can continue their efforts to crush capitalism and hoard all the money for ‘true socialists’ such as themselves.
The UN have been employing sheep for years, but most of them sit in offices.
They churn out plenty of fertiliser, though.
Many of them even perform miracles in that some sheep provide bovine fertiliser.
There’s still space for the Sustainable Advisor on Sustainability.
Ah yes,
The United Nations system is strongly committed to leading by example and ensuring that our operations are continuously monitored
bringing Big Brother to you, one bureaucrat at a time…
“If one sheep leaps into a ditch, all the rest will follow.”, an old Klingon proverb. How appropriate.
Does the report say anything about the farting and belching of the sheep?
I use “whilst” from time to time.
Did they count the grazing sheep’s emissions in determining that this was reducing their carbon footprint?
How many legs did each sheep have?
I think they are on the right track here, it is of paramount importance they reduce the UN carbon footprint, as luck would have it, unlike most of what the UN emit this is do able. All we need to do is to stop feeding it any money at all and very soon the footprint will be zero and all our countries deficits will be reduced. A win win situation with no downside I can see!
Willis wrote:
2. A new UN building in Nairobi, Kenya, has 6,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof, and is rated (not measured but rated) at 515 kilowatts of power. No word on the cost, but it looks like a bureaucrat’s palace …
Looks like?????? Bawhahahaha!
Willis: Okay, I’ll bite: Were the “invitations” to the hundreds of sheep engraved? More importantly, did a UN Task Force conclude that sheep emitted methane ( a dangerous GHG) was less harmful than allowing the grass to achieve its natural height? Was an assessment performed to determine the threat to the underlying aquifer from fecal coliform? Was there a study performed on the harmful effects of noise pollution caused by all the constant bleating? It seems to me that this program was ripe for a full Environmental Impact Statement before it was implemented, and I have barely scratched the surface. Shouldn’t a protest be lodged with the State Department? NASA? NOAA? Somebody?
I have ceased using the word “whilst” and I shan’t use it in the future. Based on my experience I must eschew its use.
“The term climate neutrality is used in this book to mean living in a way which produces no net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This should be achieved by reducing your own GHG emissions as much as possible, and using carbon offsets to neutralize the remaining emissions.”
http://www.unep.org/publications/ebooks/kick-the-habit/Default.aspx?bid=ID0ELAAC
So, this is just more of the same old BS. I so wish the US would cut its contribution to the UN by 90%. Why are we ‘sustaining’ these idiots?
Ban: family name, meaning (roughly) “a clan”.
Ki-Moon: given name; Ki means “the basis”, and Moon “literature” or “a sentence”.
The sheep are there to provide a sustainable supply of ‘sheep disguises’ for the pending increase of UN wolves.
[H/T….Edwin R Murrow…”A nation of sheep begats a government of wolves”]
Well worth whilst reading. Thank you Willis. Is the sheep illustration your creation? It’s great.
From earlier this week:
thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/11637-tennessee-passes-resolution-slamming-socialist-un-agenda-21
steveta_uk says:
April 28, 2012 at 4:45 am
I’d say that a business class seat weighs at least a person’s weight more than an economy class seat. That makes their argument valid in this case. It is a foolish thing, as all we really want is enough room to be comfortable, not an extra 100 kilos of mechanics. My armchair at home is a lot less heavy.
I’ll travel first class* in that case, as the difference in weight between business and first is not that great. Logic fail, but I’m just following UN protocol….
(*not ‘first class’ as you get in US domestic flights – that is ‘economy plus’ for the rest of the world)
How does one invite a sheep?
I suspect there is another transaction involved – as there is a herder at the other end. They’re not feral sheep…. ;-D
The UN spending money on itself……I’m shocked
Before we feed the poor, help with wars, etc……we need a new facility
Chuck Nolan,
Go ahead and use it, it’s interesting. Brit/Yank speech is separated by a common language, per Sir Winston. I even notice differences between usage in Northern and Southern California speak.
tokyoboy,
Thanks for the clarification. I always thought “Ban Ki-Moon” meant “You got it; we want it”.
steveta_uk says:
April 28, 2012 at 4:45 am
They must use less fuel, they’re sitting further back in the plane …
Nice find, Steve.
w.
tokyoboy says:
April 28, 2012 at 6:20 am
Hey, tokyoboy, good to hear from you. I was going to refer to Mr. Ban as the organ grinder’s Moon-ki … but then I realized it would be an insult to both monkeys and organ grinders …
w.
imoira says:
April 28, 2012 at 6:29 am
I’d seen that, imoira, and I thought “go Tennessee!” …
w.
Latitude says:
April 28, 2012 at 6:37 am
And not just any new facility …
w.
Willis
I think you meant 6000 square meters instead of 6000 square feet.
Richard Hanson
Now they must fill that new building with bureaucrats. No word on salaries:
Vacancies in Nairobi, Kenya. They seem to be housing a lot of NGOs. The list contains a few duplicates but some listings are for multiple openings.
Country director, Nairobi
Habitat for Humanity International
Closing Date: Friday, 01 June 2012
Finance Assistant, Nairobi (G-5)
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Closing Date: Sunday, 29 April 2012
Consultant for security assessment, Nairobi (with regular travel in the region)
Save the Children
Closing Date: Friday, 11 May 2012
Environmental Health (WASH) Technical Advisor, Nairobi
International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Field Researcher, Kenya
Voluntary Service Overseas
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Regional Coordinator of Emergency and Recovery Programme
in East Africa, Nairobi CBM
Closing Date: Friday, 04 May 2012
Area manager kakuma, Kenya
Norwegian Refugee Council
Closing Date: Friday, 04 May 2012
Operations and Office Administration Manager, Kenya
ACDI/VOCA
Closing Date: Friday, 11 May 2012
Chief of Translation Unit (Senior Reviser), Nairobi (P-5)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Saturday, 26 May 2012
Technical Advisor for Economic Development and Market Engagement,
Kenya CARE USA
Closing Date: Saturday, 12 May 2012
Regional Administrator, Nairobi
CESVI – Cooperazione e Sviluppo Onlus
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Country Director, Nairobi
Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Closing Date: Thursday, 24 May 2012
Financial management analyst, Nairobi (SB-4)
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Friday, 04 May 2012
Administrative associate, Nairobi
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Administrative associate (common services), Nairobi
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Administrative associate, Nairobi
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Administrative associate, Nairobi
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
JPO – Genetic resources and food security policy specialist, Nairobi
Bioversity International
Closing Date: Sunday, 20 May 2012
Regional Advisor, Nairobi
US Agency for International Development
Closing Date: Friday, 11 May 2012
Associate Programme Officer, Nairobi (P-2)
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
Closing Date: Saturday, 28 April 2012
Chief, Security and Safety Services, Nairobi (D-1)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Sunday, 06 May 2012
Budget and finance assistant, Nairobi (G-7)
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Closing Date: Thursday, 24 May 2012
Child Protection in Emergency in Eastern and Southern Africa, consultant, Nairobi
UN Children’s Fund
Closing Date: Wednesday, 02 May 2012
Finance and administration officer, Nairobi
Independent Medico Legal Unit
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Senior health finance advisor, Nairobi
Futures Group
Closing Date: Thursday, 17 May 2012
Internship, Nairobi
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Monday, 31 December 2012
Area representative, central Somalia, Nairobi
Save the Children
Closing Date: Saturday, 05 May 2012
Analyst emerging and good practices related to ICT,
learning and skills development, Nairobi GESCI
Closing Date: Sunday, 29 April 2012
Leadership, Management and Governance Project Advisor, Nairobi
Management Sciences for Health (MSH)
Closing Date: Saturday, 05 May 2012
Senior Project Advisor for Leadership, Management and Governance, Nairobi
Management Sciences for Health (MSH)
Closing Date: Saturday, 05 May 2012
Program Officer, Nairobi
Freedom House
Closing Date: Tuesday, 29 May 2012
Economist (human development), Nairobi
The World Bank
Closing Date: Wednesday, 02 May 2012
Women protection and empowerment program coordinator, Nairobi
International Rescue Committee
Closing Date: Monday, 07 May 2012
Programme support officer, Kenya
Danish Refugee Council
Closing Date: Sunday, 13 May 2012
Chief, Finance Services Unit, Nairobi (P-4)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Friday, 11 May 2012
Procurement and Office Manager, Kenya
ACDI/VOCA
Closing Date: Tuesday, 08 May 2012
Programme manager, Nairobi
Co-operation for the Development of Emerging Countries
Closing Date: Friday, 11 May 2012
Financial management analyst, Nairobi
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Friday, 04 May 2012
Adaptation learning programme – Mid term evaluation,
Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and Niger CARE
Closing Date: Monday, 07 May 2012
Program Associate, Nairobi
Freedom House
Closing Date: Monday, 28 May 2012
JPO – Associate scientist, understanding and using genetic
diversity to increase food security, Kenya
Bioversity International
Closing Date: Sunday, 20 May 2012
Consultant for the Fahamu Pan-African Fellowship Program Evaluation,
Kenya Fahamu
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Project Director, Nairobi
Freedom House
Closing Date: Tuesday, 29 May 2012
Administrative Officer, Nairobi (P-3)
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Closing Date: Monday, 11 June 2012
Civil engineer, multiple positions in various locations, Kenya (IICA-3)
United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS)
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Civil engineer, multiple positions in various locations, Kenya (IICA-2)
United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS)
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Financial analyst, Nairobi
Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development (ACORD)
Closing Date: Monday, 07 May 2012
Documents assistant (supervisor), Nairobi (G-7)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Sunday, 20 May 2012
Governance Specialist, Nairobi
International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Consultancy – HIV global learning review, Bahamas, China,
Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Russia, Tanzania,
Ukraine and Vietnam
American Red Cross
Closing Date: Sunday, 13 May 2012
Regional Program and Data Officer – East Africa Regional Resource Center, Nairobi ((LP) 5)
African Development Bank (AfDB)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Regional Administrator, Nairobi
CESVI – Cooperazione e Sviluppo Onlus
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Program Development Director, Business Development Unit, Nairobi
International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Regional Administrator, Nairobi
CESVI – Cooperazione e Sviluppo Onlus
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Chief of Translation Unit, Nairobi (P-5)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Saturday, 26 May 2012
Chief human rights officer, Nairobi (P-5)
United Nations Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS)
Closing Date: Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Africa Regional Auditor, Nairobi
Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED)
Closing Date: Sunday, 29 April 2012
Finance Manager, Kenya
ACDI/VOCA
Closing Date: Tuesday, 08 May 2012
Documentation of eradication of rinderpest from Somalia – Consultancy, Kenya
Somali Animal Health Services Project
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
GIS Manager, Nairobi
Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED)
Closing Date: Sunday, 20 May 2012
Senior industry specialists – Agribusiness (Washington and Nairobi), TBD
International Finance Corporation (IFC)
Closing Date: Monday, 07 May 2012
Safe house caseworker, Nairobi
Heshima Kenya
Closing Date: Sunday, 06 May 2012
Opportunity for Development Advisory Services in Fragile
and Conflict Affected States, Kenya KPMG
Closing Date: Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Governance Coordinator, Somalia Program, Nairobi
International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Closing Date: Wednesday, 30 May 2012
Project Development Intern, Nairobi
Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED)
Closing Date: Monday, 14 May 2012
Regional Program Development Officer, East Africa,
Nairobi Samaritan’s Purse
Closing Date: Monday, 30 April 2012
Protocol Officer/ Special Assistant, Nairobi (P-4)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Saturday, 28 April 2012
Chief human righs office, Somalia (P-5)
UN Political Office for Somalia
Closing Date: Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Administrative associate (common services), Nairobi (GS-6)
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Administrative associate, Nairobi (GS-6)
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
Closing Date: Tuesday, 01 May 2012
Local security associate, Nairobi (LICA-4)
United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS)
Closing Date: Thursday, 17 May 2012
Finance assistant, Nairobi
Mulrany International
Closing Date: Friday, 11 May 2012
Senior policy advisor, Nairobi
Futures Group
Closing Date: Thursday, 17 May 2012
Regional Sales Representatives, Nairobi
IRES
Closing Date: Tuesday, 22 May 2012
Chief of Translation Unit (Senior Reviser), Nairobi (P-5)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Saturday, 26 May 2012
Chief of Translation Unit (Senior Reviser) (6 Posts), Nairobi (P-5)
United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)
Closing Date: Saturday, 26 May 2012
Deputy director, Nairobi (D-1)
Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS)
Closing Date: Sunday, 17 June 2012
Senior investment officer, agribusiness and forestry sector, Nairobi
International Finance Corporation (IFC)
Closing Date: Sunday, 13 May 2012
Principal investment officer, agribusiness and forestry, Nairobi
International Finance Corporation (IFC)
Closing Date: Sunday, 13 May 2012
Someone explain to me how long the UN would last without the US funding its scam?
Here is what Reuters reported on the UN backed COP Conference’s carbon footprint.
As Willis has pointed out they are making inroads into their c02 output – just increasing. 😉
Dear Mr Willis Eschenbach
Loved this post of yours. Especially the sheep drawing and the garbage container photo.
The photo reminded me of what they showed, in the 1960 film “savage innocents”, ( with Anthony Quinn and Peter O’Toole ) , about the inuits and their old way of managing the carbon footprint of their elders. Apparently, when a village elder reached 80, the village threw a farewell party for him (or her), and then, they left him (or her ) abandoned on the ice platform, for the polar bears to feed on.
Could that be the method the UN would like to put in place ?. Because, obviously we old people usually feel the cold more than the young, and are less productive, so we use more energy than we “deserve”.
The people inside the winning photo container look quite young, but that could be a “thin edge of the wedge” strategy, just to plant the idea on people’s minds that there are too many people, and that humanity would benefit by treating the surplus, ( namely, the elderly, the sick, the helpless, the ones with psychiatric problems ) like garbage.
Your old Spanish fan:
María Maestre
@DBCooper. Your post is a joke, right?
What is the UN´s carbon foot print?. My guess is that the best sustainability possible would be to get rid of this big carbon monster.
Here are the successes that he highlights:
1. The UN website launched a new section of its website, called “Greening the Blue“. It seems to be dedicated to the proposition that if you can’t do it yourself, you should tell others to do it.
2. A new UN building in Nairobi, Kenya, has 6,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof, and is rated (not measured but rated) at 515 kilowatts of power. No word on the cost, but it looks like a bureaucrat’s palace …
—————————————————————————
We will now apply all Carbon Credits, Carbon Offsets, Cap and Trade Restrictions, and Minimal Carbon Footprint Formula to the plans…
After all the “adjustments”, here is what the new sustainable building with solar panels and web server look like:
http://farm1.staticflickr.com/227/445381587_cef506eaa8_z.jpg
Ain’t sustainability just grand…
From Aviemore Scotland today.
Last Updated on: 28/04/2012 10:40
OUR CAR PARKS ARE NOW FULL. The number 31 bus brings you up here, it leaves Aviemore at 10 minutes past the hour, every hour.
HIGH AVALANCHE RISK ON THE HEAD WALL AND CORONATION WALL.
KEEP AWAY FROM THESE AREAS.
Top station weather – 6cm of fresh snow overnight, Temperature -5C, Minimal wind 5mph NNE. Fantastic conditions up here today with superb snow quality and sunshine!! Doesn’t get much better than this!
WUWT?
Bottom line: more jobs, larger system, more power.
It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad,
imoira, I think we went through this drill earlier this week, but, do you have any references to the primary documents regarding UN Agenda 21?
‘Primary’ meaning references to the UN documents themselves (in particular, references to paragraphs or those particular ‘parts’ dealing with things like ‘land grabs’ and such), not somebody else’s (possibly slanted) interpretation.
Not that The New American (house organ for the John Birch Society and whose view on some things like “less government” I share) has taken a slanted view or anything …
.
_Jim says: April 28, 2012 at 8:21 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
and all the primary documentation you could wish for:
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml
Marion says:
April 28, 2012 at 2:35 am
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6736517/Copenhagen-climate-summit-1200-limos-140-private-planes-and-caviar-wedges.html
Which includes this paragraph:
“As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change “Truth Squad.” The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.”
PLUS How many “security people, bodyguards, personal assistants, personal trainers, makeup advisors, etc……?”
“Read the literature. -gavin”
Thanks.
(The request was for “in particular, references to paragraphs or those particular ‘parts’ dealing with things like ‘land grabs’ and such”.)
.
Imagine sheep roaming and fertilizing the pristine Central Park in New York City and how that would work out. Probably OK if you never went to the park.
The UN plans to lead by example. They expect sacrifice in support of their goals from contributing sovereign nations but the UN has nothing invested in manufacturing, farming, mining, distribution and sales and in the lives of the unwashed so they can make no similar sacrifice. They, the UN, cannot possibly lead a sovereign nation and certainly not the unwashed.
The point is do we want to be ruled by unelected regulators or governed by elected representatives?
Regulations and rules that have not gone through and approved by representative process do not have the benefit of accountability to the public. In no way can a blank check to regulators be considered representation.
What is perfection and exists beyond reality? Zero defects, zero tolerance and Carbon neutral.
Oh my. You can’t make this stuff up to make them look more dumb. Those names for UN positions, now known by the readership here, paint this in the colors of elite budget busting liberal hogwash. I swear, if there is one last dollar on Earth to spend, a liberal will spend it. But I’ll be damned if I will stand by and let any of my hard earned taxes go to support the new “Administer of the Global Sustainable Green Earth Environmental Neutrality Initiative Muffin Society”.
I will never vote for liberalism again. If I can’t make my own way in life, for gawd’s sake all you bleeding heart liberals, don’t help me. I don’t need that kind of Earth Muffin Society help.
Q: “Whilst”? Who says “whilst” these days?
A: Brits.
All the UN need do for “carbon neutrality” is buy offsets. They don’t need more bureaucracy. They just want it.
Get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US!!
Seriously, why is the UN emitting any CO2? Not just “carbon neutral”, which is the equivalent of paying someone to take away your garbage, but instead REQUIRE THE UN TO HAVE ZERO CO2 EMISSIONS.
The UN through the IPCC tells us that CO2 is bad. SO WHY IS THE UN EMITTING ANY CO2?
Isn’t it high time that we required the UN to have ZERO CARBON EMISSIONS?
Shouldn’t that be the point of all discussions regarding the UN? Require each and every UN representative to have zero carbon emissions. We know carbon emissions are harming the planet.
We don’t want the UN carbon emissions to be sustained. We wanted them to be banned.
_Jim@8:21 a.m.
You’ll have to do a bit of reading yourself and, when you do, take note of all the areas of our lives that Agenda 21 seeks to influence.
Robert E. Phelan@8:31a.m.
Thank you for providing the links before I even realized they’d been requested.
How many of the sheep were actually wolves – cunningly disguised?
Until we know this it is impossible to ascertain the underlying relative background sustainability ratio factor, making the whole project worthless!
Do white sheep have a greater albedo than black sheep? I think so.
I hope those were nice, reflective white sheep they invited.
To you really want to understand the UN, read up on its predecessor, the League of Nations. In terms of relevance to anything that matters nowadays, they’re now on a par.
Pointman
Our (USA) folks that party on tax payer $$ recently bought parts for 75 bikes and had a Team-Building Exercise putting them together. Only $75,000 for the parts.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/18/gsa-scandal-so-what-does-823000-buy-you-in-las-vegas/
The UN could have a similar bonding event with their sustainable employees and build some reel lawn mowers and then put said machines to work:
http://bugmoney.pbworks.com/f/ReelMower.gif
UN programs seem to have the same effect on people as Vogon poetry.
Looking at the top photo, it isn’t a trash can at all. It is a blue recycling bin. Those happy folks are on their way to the Soylent Green factory to be recycled. The ultimate in sustainable development.
No development is sustainable otherwise. Even if you are a vegetarian then the food you eat is removing micro-nutirents from the soil that cannot be replaced unless farmers start plowing you under to nourish the next years crop. Cannibalism cuts out the middle man in a 100% recycled sustainable economy, reducing the need for CO2 production.
Sustainable development. Dog eat dog wearing a frilly dress and lipstick.
Stephanie Clague says:
April 28, 2012 at 4:34 am
“Sounds wonderful” And right there is the problem isn’t it? They live in a bubble of their own self importance and bloated self opinion unable to comprehend how normal people see them…
Absolutely agree with everything you wrote in your comment – well said.
Reading about the UN in general, and this post is particular, does anyone have any idea what these sorts of people (the people that work in these bureaucratic organizations) would do if they did not work at the UN? I am particularly naive about this as I am from a working-class family and work for a living myself in a factory – I happen in this case to own the factory but that’s beside the point; I still work for a living.
As I read the comments here, most are quite disparaging of the Mandarins at the UN. So am I. But then I realize that I have no idea what they actually do all day. What does the Consultant, Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development for example, actually do all day?
Does anyone with such exposure and experience care to weigh in? I am sincerely curious. Maybe they actually work pretty hard – go in to work everyday, go to meetings (I imagine there are lots of meetings), read and write reports and the like, travel to places like Bali, Rio, Geneva, etc, for more meetings – maybe unwind a bit in the evening and do some networking.
Back home it’s back to work, writing grant proposals, press releases, hand out prizes for best sustainability photo or whatnot. Is that it? I certainly hope they actually achieve almost nothing because I suspect their agenda, if actually followed, would probably result in damage to real people. And I say that because if their skill set suits them for the kind of work I have described above, then working on and solving actual problems would more than likely elude such types of people. I mean, can you image one of these light-weight, petty fools working on anything requiring human ingenuity, grit or skill?
The picture I have in my mind is something like that nice but somewhat bossy lady at church that volunteers for every single committee and goes to every single church event – but no one actually pays her any attention.
And I believe I can say with some confidence I have never said or written the word “whilst” until today. If given the assignment, “use the word “whilst” in a sentence”, I would answer something like:
Whilst writing this sentence, I am thinking of going and getting some donuts. How’d I do?
A new UN building in Nairobi, Kenya, has 6,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof, and is rated (not measured but rated) at 515 kilowatts of power.
If it is square feet, then that is 85w/sq.ft. – not in this lifetime…
If it is square meters, then that is 8w/sq.ft. – which is low but about right for an over bloated bureaucracy…
“MOVING TOWARDS A CLIMATE NEUTRAL UN”
The UN at work. REDD stealing land from indigenous people’s worldwide, planting trees in place of crops and claiming credit for absorbing CO2. All perfectly legal. The result, millions of new refugees all needing UN help. More jobs for the UN. It is a win-win.
That’s what I see people keep writing “… all the areas of our lives that Agenda 21 seeks to influence..”, but no one can cite or reference anything specific (even one ‘for instance’ for example), just wide sweeping hand gestures and allusions to ‘schemes’.
When reading the UN docs, am I just supposed to get a general ‘feeling’ that they intend to take over all aspects of my life, world commerce, and farming in general? It would help if someone rational could write a comprehensive, cohesive, coherent article tying some of the far-flung points together on this issue …
.
_Jim says:
April 28, 2012 at 8:21 am
“imoira, I think we went through this drill earlier this week, but, do you have any references to the primary documents regarding UN Agenda 21?
‘Primary’ meaning references to the UN documents themselves (in particular, references to paragraphs or those particular ‘parts’ dealing with things like ‘land grabs’ and such), not somebody else’s (possibly slanted) interpretation.”
Jim
Perhaps the following may help!
http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/
http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/Agenda21.pdf
You will see that these two documents are pretty much identical
Further documents include:
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/csd/csd_index.shtml Division for Sustainable Devemopment
Multi-year program of work http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/csd/csd_multyearprogwork.shtm
Social and Economic Dimensions http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml
I hope these come out as links and are what you want!
Whilst reading your post I couldn’t help but see the irony between the “sheep” and what they left behind and the “UN” and the legacy they will be leaving behind. Moreover, I’ve always wanted to start a sentence with those two words.
Maybe, just maybe, giving these people ethereal job titles and something to worry about does exactly what we need them to do. Spend their days admiring the problem, writing about it, researching it, writing some more about it, hold meetings and conferences centered on it, make speeches, etc. Fill their day with meaningless drivel dressed up as life-savingly important topics, just to keep them busy. Kind of like giving them jobs making license plates, isn’t it. They are endlessly busy, all in one place, and off the streets.
Willis, for some reason your writings remind of the Kieth Laumer short stories of Jame Retief, agent of the Corps Diplomatique.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671318578/0671318578.htm
Thanks Willis,
When I saw ““MOVING TOWARDS A CLIMATE NEUTRAL UN”” I had a momentary hope they would BE neutral about the climate, but alas, no.
_Jim says:
April 28, 2012 at 8:43 am
“(The request was for “in particular, references to paragraphs or those particular ‘parts’ dealing with things like ‘land grabs’ and such”.)”
One of the advantages of having so many bureaucrats on staff is that they can come up with very elegant ways of saying “land grabs” without actually using those words.
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_10.shtml
And of course, Gore and Ehrlich on back on their soapboxes again. Check Morano’s site for the details.
ferd berple says:
April 28, 2012 at 9:09 am
Don’t they want us to get CO2 back to 350ppm or else
“we’re all gonna’ die” ?
To roll back CO2, the UN needs to show us how to build a building with “NEGATIVE CO2 EMISSIONS”. The UN needs to show us by example…
How about planting redwood or sequoia trees, wait a few hundred years, then hollow them out to make little cubicle offices… that’s the most negative thing that I can think of…
A fitting negative solution, for a most deserving international organization.
I was taught we used to live in trees anyway…
…so being close to our “roots” would be very natural and sustainable.
I like the idea, and it’s perfect for the UN.
Back when I was a student at Berkeley, I lived in a student cooperative, consisting of multiple buildings surrounding the campus, where hundreds of students lived. We paid less rent because we were supposed to do “workshifts”, or jobs to reduce costs. For example, I cooked breakfasts for over 100 people for half a year, and an alternate menu for dinners the second half. There were many different jobs to do.
One house in the cooperative had a bunch of communist radicals living in it. Big surprise in Berkeley. I’m not kidding. They had a table on Sproul Plaza where they handed out RCYB literature and sold little red flags. It was well known these leaders of the coming Revolution didn’t do their workshifts. And then it hit me: If you are a leader of the revolution, you don’t do work. Work is for the Proletariat. The real scam in communism-socialism is the leaders don’t do the work. They are too busy planning everyone else’s work schedules.
The story above is a great illustration of the emptiness of the UN and all socialist governments, like Sacramento. It’s full of planners, essential personnel all trying as hard as they can to avoid doing any real work. They like to sit and think and maybe write or make videos. Endless propaganda while the system falls apart.
So one day I’m walking through Sproul Plaza and I see my favorite table and one of my coop comrades selling little red flags. Something clicked in my head and I decided buy one for 50 cents. Then I walked over to a UC Police cop who didn’t have a friendly face because I’m holding a red flag. I asked him if I would get in trouble if I burned this red flag right here. He got a VERY big smile on his face and said, “No you won’t”. I pulled out my lighter and started to heat up the bottom corner of the flag. The commie dude comes running over with a very angry expression and rips the flag out of my hand. How strange. They frequently exercised their right to burn American flags on Sproul Plaza, but I couldn’t burn that one little red flag. To this day I regret not pressing charges for petty theft of that flag. I had a perfect witness.
This is about Maurice Strong who started the whole thing about CAGW.
He is the ultimate fraudster according to this article.
Maurice Strong
Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear.
But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization.
From Oil for Food to the latest scandals involving U.N. funding in North Korea, Maurice Strong appears as a shadowy and often critically important figure.
Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world’s environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.’s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
But his green credentials scarcely begin to do justice to Strong’s complicated back-room career. He has spent decades migrating through a long list of high-level U.N. posts, standing behind the shoulder of every U.N. secretary-general since U Thant . Without ever holding elected office, he has had a hand in some of the world’s most important bureaucratic appointments, both at the U.N. and at the World Bank. A Canadian wheeler-dealer with an apple face and pencil mustache, Strong has parlayed his personal enthusiasms and connections into a variety of huge U.N. projects, while punctuating his public service with private business deals.
Along the way, Strong has also been caught up in a series of U.N. scandals and conflicts of interest. These extend from the notorious Oil-for-Food program to the latest furor over cash funneled via U.N. agencies to the rogue regime of North Korea, which involves, among other things, Strong’s creative use of a little-known, U.N.-chartered educational institution called the University for Peace. Above all, the tale of Maurice Strong illustrates the way in which the U.N., with its bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach, lends itself to manipulation by a small circle of those who best know its back corridors.
Officially, Strong cut his ties to the U.N. Secretariat almost two years ago, as federal investigators homed in on the discovery that back in 1997, while serving as a top adviser to then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he took a check for almost $1 million that was bankrolled by Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned regime. The check was delivered by a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who was convicted last summer in New York Federal Court of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials on behalf of Baghdad. Strong denied any wrongdoing and said he would step aside from his U.N. envoy post until the matter was cleared up.
Since then, Strong has receded, as he often does, into the shadows. He is currently spending most of his time in China. His name flickered recently through the speaker lineup for a gala dinner for clean technologies in San Francisco, but the organizers say he then canceled because “he has so much going on” in China.
China is a special place for Strong, a self-declared, life-long socialist. It is the burial place of a woman said to be one of his relatives, the famous pro-communist American journalist Anna Louise Strong, a vociferous supporter of Lenin and Stalin until the mid-‘30s, and a strong booster of Mao Zedong’s China. Maurice Strong’s presence in Beijing, however, raises awkward questions: For one thing, China, while one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial pollution, has been profiting from the trading of carbon emissions credits – thanks to heavily politicized U.N.-backed environmental deals engineered by Strong in the 1990s.
Strong has refused to answer questions from FOX News about the nature of his business in China, though he has been linked in press reports to planned attempts to market Chinese-made automobiles in North America, and a spokesman for the U.S.-based firm that had invited him to speak in San Francisco, Cleantech Venture Network, says he has recently been “instrumental” in helping them set up a joint venture in Beijing. Strong’s assistant in Beijing did confirm by e-mail that he has an office in a Chinese government-hosted diplomatic compound, thanks to “many continuing relationships arising from his career including 40 years of active relationships in China.”
And from China, Strong has to this day maintained a network of personal and official connections within the U.N. system that he has long used to spin his own vast web of non-governmental organizations, business associates and ties to global glitterati. Within that web, Strong has developed a distinctive pattern over the years of helping to set up taxpayer-funded public bureaucracies, both outside and within the U.N., which he then taps for funding and contacts when he moves on to other projects.
Working With Kofi Annan
Working as a top adviser to Annan from 1997 to 2005, Strong was the author of Annan’s first big round of U.N. reforms, which broadly shifted power away from the member states and toward his boss in the Secretariat. These changes included adding the post of a deputy secretary-general to help manage the expanding turf of the Secretariat. Annan first gave that job to a Canadian, Louise Frechette, who ultimately drew criticism for mismanaging Oil-for-Food and left the U.N. early last year to join a Canadian institute that included Strong on its board of governors. Annan replaced Frechette with one of Strong’s former colleagues from a stint dating back to the mid-1990s at the World Bank, Mark Malloch Brown, who — with Strong as one of his special advisers — had then served under Annan from 1999-2005 as head of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP).
More ominously, Strong’s reforms also created the Office of the Iraq Program, which consolidated ad hoc operations into one department inside the U.N. Secretariat that was better known as the Oil For Food program. That office was headed by Benon Sevan, who was indicted last month in New York federal court for taking bribes via Oil-for-Food deals (Sevan, beyond reach of U.S. extradition in Cyprus, has denied any wrongdoing).
Strong also had a hand around 1997-1998 in creating the Byzantine structure of Ted Turner’s ground-breaking $1 billion gift to the U.N., which Turner since 1998 has been doling out in installments from his Washington-based U.N. Foundation. Turner’s funding, augmented in recent years by money from other donors, flows into the U.N. from the U.N. Foundation through a specially created U.N. department set up under Annan in 1998 and administered not by the budgetary arm of the U.N. General Assembly, but by the secretary-general.
Styling himself as a guru of global governance, Strong also helped to launch a major campaign for the U.N. to entwine its murky and graft-prone bureaucracy with big business, via so-called public-private partnerships. Strong introduced this process in his 1997 reform proposal as the bland notion of “consultation between the United Nations and the business community.”
Through his maneuvers, Strong has nurtured the U.N.’s natural tendencies to grow like kudzu into a system that now extends far beyond its own organizational chart. In this jungle, it is not only tough to track how the money is spent, but almost impossible to tally how much really rolls in – or flows through — and from where, and for what.
The U.N. today claims to have a core annual budget of only about $1.9 billion. But its total budget is more on the order of $20 billion per year, trailing off at the edges into opaque trusts, complicated in-kind donations and odd projects shielded by U.N. immunities — and accounting complexities — from any real oversight. And the potential for conflicts of interest is huge — and often overlooked by the U.N. itself.
Strong’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering has also put him in the cockpit of global power politics. From 2003 to 2005, he served as Annan’s personal envoy to the nuclear-crisis-wracked Korean peninsula. That role took him to Pyongyang, and also brought him into close contact with the South Korean government, where Ban Ki-moon, who last month took over from Annan as U.N. Secretary-General, was then foreign minister. In 2004, for example, Ban and Strong shared a head table at the annual dinner of the Korea Society in New York.
South Korean diplomats have downplayed any connections between Ban and Strong. But one of Ban’s first acts when he took charge at the U.N. last month was to appoint as his head of management a Strong protégé, Alicia Barcena, a Mexican environmentalist. It was Strong who brought Barcena into the U.N. orbit, in 1991, to help organize the Rio summit on the environment, which he chaired in 1992. To prepare and then follow up on the Rio agenda, Strong founded a network called the Earth Council Alliance, in which Barcena served until 1995 as the founding director of the flagship chapter, based in Costa Rica. She then moved on to jobs inside the U.N. system, including work with UNEP and UNDP. When Strong took charge of the University for Peace along with his other projects eight years ago, he invited the Costa Rica Earth Council to move its offices onto the university campus, where it was absorbed into the U Peace structure and curriculum.
In her current slot as chief of the U.N.’s administrative and financial operations, Barcena looks likely to have a managerial hand in an audit that Ban has promised of U.N. related flows of money to North Korea — in which Strong’s University for Peace played a part.
Means to an End
Indeed, as a microcosm of how Strong navigates the U.N. universe to achieve ends that are often far from visible, there is no better example than the use he has made of the odd little U.N. offshoot in Central America called the University for Peace.
Located on the outskirts of the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, U Peace was set up back in 1980 with the approval of the U.N. General Assembly as a school to promote “the interdisciplinary study of all matters related to peace.” From the start, it enjoyed a curious status. It was chartered by the U.N., and its governing council has always been dominated by appointees of the U.N. secretary-general. But at the same time, U Peace operates with no regular U.N. funding, and is subject to no U.N. oversight – even though occasional reports on U Peace are given by the secretary-seneral to the U.N. General Assembly.
Strong himself, in memoirs he published about six years ago under the title “Where on Earth Are We Going?”, may have been one of the first to seize on U Peace’s stealth-like possibilities. He noted that while working for Annan in 1997 on U.N. reform, “I studied the constitutions of each of the U.N. organizations and was intrigued to find that the autonomous nature of the University for Peace exempted it from the normal reporting, administrative, personnel and other bureaucratic requirements.”
At the time Strong observed those traits, U Peace had become little more than a shell. As described by various sources, it was low on students and lower on funding; its activities, such as they were, were confined to Central and South America.
Two years later, in 1999, Annan suddenly gave U Peace a major upgrade. He re-stocked the institution’s governing council with fresh appointees, who promptly elected Maurice Strong as their president. Strong, who already had interests in Costa Rica, including not only the Earth Council offices opened by Barcena, but some beachfront property he had purchased in 1978, took on the revamping of U Peace alongside his duties as a close adviser to Annan, and then as Annan’s Pyongyang envoy.
The result, after more than seven years of Strong’s stewardship, is a small school in Costa Rica, handing out degrees in fields such as “peaceology,” while serving in effect as Strong’s unofficial branch office — one of the quiet hubs for his global network. Sporting the U.N. emblem, but with no U.N. oversight, U Peace has also opened offices in Addis Ababa, Geneva and New York. The Geneva and New York offices both have the strange feature that they have no dealings with students, but enjoy close ties to U.N. facilities via the UNDP for moving people and money around the globe.
And for a tiny outfit in Central America, U Peace has developed an extraordinary recent interest in North Korea. Starting with a push by Annan in 2003 for a U.N. development strategy for North Korea, that interest appears to have migrated from an inter-agency task force convened by Strong inside the UNDP, to an initiative pursued by Strong via U Peace — a vehicle exempt from any normal U.N. oversight.
In 2004, with a seed donation of about $330,000 from the Canadian International Development Agency (of which Strong was the founding president from 1968-1970), U Peace set up a trust fund dedicated to North Korean projects, called the DPRK Trust Fund. That same year, 2004, Strong hosted a conference in Vevey, Switzerland, on North Korean “energy scenarios.” That conference served as a basis for a 2005 report supervised by Strong, and underwritten by U Peace. Along with Canadian money, U.S. government records show that the funding for the report also included a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. A former Energy Department assistant secretary, William Martin, worked on the 2005 report, and recently took over from Strong as head of the U Peace governing council.
Among the contributors to the U Peace energy report, described in it as acting “in a personal capacity,” is a former head of UNDP’s regional bureau for Asia and the Pacific, Nay Htun, who spends part of his time working in the New York office of U Peace, according to the head of that office, Narinder Kakar. (Nay Htun, an engineer, unsuccessfully ran last year to become head of the World Health Organization, as a candidate sponsored by Burma.)
At this point the cross ties grow at a blinding pace between U Peace and other U.N. ventures in which Strong played a leading role.
The U Peace report concludes, for example, with proposals for a $1.4 million energy project for North Korea, one third of that supported in cash and in-kind by the government of North Korea, and the rest to be funded by $150,000 from the UNDP and $750,000 from a U.N. outfit called the Global Environment Facility, or GEF.
The GEF, spawned by the 1992 Rio conference (which Strong chaired) is a joint effort of UNEP (which Strong founded) and the World Bank (where Strong was appointed in 1995 as a senior adviser to the president) and the UNDP (run from 1999-2005 by Strong’s former World Bank colleague, Mark Malloch Brown, and from 2005 to the present by another of Strong’s former World Bank colleagues, Kemal Dervis).
The report prescribes that the follow-up on its energy project be implemented by North Korea’s “National Coordinating Committee for the Environment” and “the DPRK Academy of Sciences” – an outfit that quite likely includes North Korean officials involved in the country’s missile and nuclear bomb programs.
And last summer, using the UNDP’s staff and diplomatically privileged facilities to handle the travel arrangements, and the money, U Peace paid to send a delegation of 10 North Korean officials to an energy conference at Lund University, in Sweden. U.N. internal documents seen by Fox show that the payment for the North Korean travel was requested by the U Peace office in Switzerland, handled by former UNDP official Nay Htun in New York, and involved bankrolling the airfares and transferring cash stipends to the traveling North Korean officials via the UNDP office in Pyongyang.
Junket Financier
The use of U Peace as the financier of the junket served at least one important purpose: it allowed UNDP to declare, if asked, that it had not violated any internal rules about financing North Korean travel or using hard currency for the benefit of North Korean officials. This is a charge that has been vigorously brought by the U.S. Government concerning U.N. funding via its offices in Pyongyang, which are run by UNDP. Those accusations prompted Ban Ki-moon last month to promise a full external audit of U.N. operations world-wide, starting in North Korea.
But the Lund affair may involve still further twists and turns. According to lists leaked from within UNDP, the ten North Korean officials who went to Sweden were all listed for purposes of the trip as functionaries of North Korea’s energy industry. Yet the names that have been leaked point to other intriguing possibilities.
For example, the group included someone named Jon Yong Ryong, described in the leaked UNDP list as “Expert, Environment and Energy.” That is the same name, as it happens, of a North Korean official posted a few years ago to the North Korean mission to the U.N. in New York. That official spoke up at a 2003 meeting of the U.N. Disarmament Commission to lambaste the U.S. and assure the commission that in North Korea, “nuclear activities will be confined at the present stage to the production of electricity” – a promise belied by North Korea’s test last October of a nuclear bomb.
Another name on the leaked list, this one described as “Senior Officer, Power Resources Development,” is that of Ri Kwang Su. There was a broadcaster with that same name on North Korean radio, whose commentary as translated by the BBC monitoring service on March 28, 2005, included, “Our army and people will keep enhancing the nuclear deterrent forces.”
What exactly is going on, who these traveling North Koreans actually were, or what U Peace is really doing, is hard to determine. A spokesman for the UNDP would only say that “UNDP often acts as a kind of central service provider for the U.N. system … so it would be normal for a UNDP country office to assist the University for Peace on something like transferring funds for travel and arranging tickets.”
But there is nothing normal about this setup, starting with the relationship between U Peace and the “U.N. system.”
In response to questions emailed by FOX News, a U Peace official confirmed that “U Peace does not come under the purview or oversight” of U.N. auditors. A confidential assessment of U Peace carried out in 2004 by the Canadian International Development Agency, which bankrolled what U Peace calls the “DPRK Trust Fund,” noted that “an evaluation would normally benefit from periodic monitoring and evaluation reports produced by the institution itself or by external observers. Such reports do not exist.”
This below-the-radar arrangement is rationalized by both U.N. and U Peace officials on the grounds that the U Peace does not depend on the U.N. for funding (although over the past five years U Peace has received at least $280,000 in grants from UNDP, along with in-kind support). But in rattling the cup for donations, and apparently in pursuing projects, U Peace appears to trade heavily on the fact that it wears the U.N. label. On its website, it advertises that “although U Peace is not subject to U.N. regulations and does not receive regular U.N. funding, it has strong links with the U.N. Secretary-General’s office and many other parts of the U.N. system.” (Nor do the “strong links” stop there. The rector of U Peace from 2005-2006 was Julia Marton-Lefevre; she is the sister-in-law of Richard Holbrooke, formerly U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. under President Bill Clinton.)
The question is, what is the “U.N. system?” Most of those links appear to have involved Maurice Strong himself, who shortly before taking on U Peace had added to his multitude of other U.N. roles a new one as part of a new, privately funded financial center inside the U.N. Secretary General’s office.
In fact, records show that at the same time that he first took over U Peace, Strong was on both sides of the biggest single donation that rolled in to support his revamping of the institution.
Channeling Ted Turner’s Money
Strong’s role as a private U.N. financier dates back to 1997 and early 1998, while working on Annan’s reform plan for the entire Secretariat. In the midst of that effort, Strong helped structure a new office inside the Secretariat called the U.N Fund for International Partnerships (UNFIP), dedicated to a novel enterprise: channeling Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift to the U.N. directly through the Secretariat, in annual allotments of $100 million, to select projects within the U.N. system. Turner later cut back on his own annual contributions, supplementing his money with donations from others, and thus stretching out the UN Foundation’s direct link to the Secretary-General for years to come.
Turner’s U.N. Foundation money began flowing in 1998. That same year, while listed in the U.N. phone book as affiliated with UNFIP, and working as a special adviser to Annan, Strong joined the U.N Foundation’s board of directors. In effect, Strong stood at a special new crossroads within the U.N., where a variety of private funders would be taking a major role in funding future U.N. plans.
In 2000, UN records show that the UN Foundation., with Strong still a board member, approved a $2 million grant that flowed through the U.N. via UNFIP to U Peace, where Strong had just taken charge. Strong then resigned from the U.N. Foundation board.
At the same time, Strong was getting private funding from other sources that would eventually prove even more questionable. Last summer, at the trial of Tongsun Park, Saddam’s illicit lobbyist, it emerged in court testimony that a few years after Strong accepted from Park the check for almost $1 million funded by Baghdad, the two men had set up yet another business arrangement. In the year 2000, according to evidence presented in court, Tongsun Park was paying the rent for a private office Strong used in Manhattan. This was in parallel with his official work as an Under-Secretary-General and special adviser to Annan at the U.N., and his new post as head of U Peace.
To whatever conflicts of interest this might have entailed, Strong added another one by hiring his own stepdaughter, Kristina Mayo, to work in his official U.N. office, without declaring the family relationship to the U.N.. Mayo’s name also came up at Park’s trial, as the person who in 2000 handled the checks sent on behalf of Park to pay for Strong’s private New York office. In June, 2000, for example, Mayo sent a fax providing details for the money to be deposited directly into Strong’s account at the U.N. branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Why Strong, often described as a tycoon, would have been relying on Park to pay his private office rent at that time has not been explained.
But then, it seems Park and Strong had known each other, and had business dealings, for years. Strong himself told the press in 2005 that when he took on the role from 2003-2005 as Annan’s personal envoy to the Korean peninsula, Tongsun Park served as one of his advisers.
This was a relationship in which it’s unlikely that Strong could have been oblivious to Park’s earlier history as one of the star players in the 1970s congressional bribery scandal known as Koreagate. In that saga, Park was indicted on federal charges including money laundering, racketeering and acting as an unregistered agent of South Korea’s Central Intelligence Agency. He testified in exchange for immunity, and for a while dropped out of sight.
But by the early 1990s, Park was back on the East Coast power corridor social scene, and had befriended the U.N.’s then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, paying calls on him at the U.N.’s official residence on Sutton Place, and sending flowers to his wife. In the autumn of 1996, before Annan took the top U.N. job, Strong served as a special adviser to Boutros-Ghali. That same autumn, around October, 1996, Strong and Park did some business together, lobbying for the sale of Canadian nuclear reactors to the Korean peninsula. The man who recruited them jointly for this assignment was a Canadian, Reid Morden, then head of a Canadian Crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, with which Park at the time had a consultancy.
What goes around at the U.N. apparently never ceases to come around: nearly a decade later, from 2004 to 2005, Reid Morden worked for Paul Volcker as the operating head of the U.N-authorized probe into Oil-for-Food – in which both Park and Strong again turned up. The early relationship between Morden and the two men was revealed only in a terse footnote on page 100 in the second volume of Volcker’s four-volume final report, along with the notice that Morden had recused himself from the sections of the investigation involving his two former associates.
Beyond that, Maurice Strong’s ties to movers and shakers in other parts of the “U.N. system” multiply in dizzying directions – not least involving Kojo Annan, the U.N. Secretary General’s son, whose own possible conflict of interest in the Oil for food scandal was among the factors that first sparked the Volcker investigation. Kofi Annan called for the independent probe after press reports revealed that his son, Kojo Annan, had been working for a Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna Inspection, which in 1998 had won the U.N. contract to inspect goods shipped to Saddam’s Iraq under the U.N. program.
‘Sustainable Tourism’
On Dec. 28, 1999 — around the same time that Strong was concurrently taking charge of U Peace, and serving as a special adviser to Annan, and sitting on the board of Turner’s U.N. Foundation — Maurice Strong and Kojo Annan simultaneously joined the board of a company called Air Harbour Technologies. Registered in the Isle of Man and Cyprus, Air Harbour was a venture put together by a young Saudi businessman, Hani Yamani, whose father, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, was once Saudi Arabia’s powerful oil minister.
Air Harbour aspired to a role in “sustainable tourism,” mapping out a number of projects in Switzerland, Cyprus and Africa, which appear never to have fully materialized. Strong spent just over six months on the board, then resigned in July, 2000. Kojo Annan remained on the board, where he was joined in January 2001 by a family friend and former associate from Cotecna, Michael Wilson. Six months later they both resigned, at which point, according to Volcker’s probe, Air Harbour had ceased operations .
And Paul Volcker had his own links to Strong. One of these ties ran through the World Bank. Strong, while running a Canadian firm called Power Corporation of Canada in the 1960s, had hired a young Australian, James Wolfensohn, who went on to found his own investment firm, Wolfensohn Associates, where Volcker took a job in 1988 after leaving his post as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. In 1995, Wolfensohn, with Strong’s backing, became President of the World Bank, and promoted Volcker to take his place as chief executive of Wolfensohn Associates. At the World Bank, Wolfensohn then hired his old employer, Strong, as a special adviser. And when Volcker, nine years later, was tapped by Annan to run the UN inquiry into Oil-for-Food, it was from the World Bank, then still under Wolfensohn, that Volcker drew the initial team to set up his investigation.
Volcker for many years, and at least until 2003, also held a seat alongside Yamani senior – the father of Air Harbour’s chairman — on the advisory board of the Power Corporation where Strong, serving as president in the 1960s, had then employed Wolfensohn.
All this is just a sampling of the tangled nest of personal relationships, public-private partnerships, murky trust funds, unaudited funding conduits, and inter-woven enterprises that the modern U.N. has come to embody—and which Maurice Strong has done so much to create. Yet another potential conflict of interest involves a company called Zenon Environmental Inc., a manufacturer of water purification equipment, which in April, 2000 was registered as an approved Canadian vendor to the U.N. procurement department. Six months later, Strong joined Zenon’s board, and remained there through at least 2005, while also serving as a special adviser to Annan. Zenon was acquired last year by General Electric, and the board was dissolved.
To clean up the U.N., Ban has called for auditors to work their way through the offices and agencies of the system one by one, starting with operations in North Korea. That circuitous approach is unlikely to work. To cut to the core, the real starting point could well be for Ban to launch an investigation into the past and current career of Maurice Strong himself.
Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.
[Next time just post the link. ~dbs, mod.]
The tailplane of a typically configured aircraft creates aerodynamic force that pushes downward, not upward, to provide flight stability. Putting more weight aft creates less requirement for downward aerodynamic force (lift = drag – even downward lift) and so provides for greater efficiency of that flying surface. It also unloads the main wing which also becomes more efficient. Taken too far the aircraft can become unstable, leading to an uncomfortable porpoising effect in flight. They probably deserve it. Regardless of where they sit the airlines try to configure the center of gravity for greatest safety and flight efficiency.
It would probably save more fuel if they simply video-conferenced. If their flying time were not paid for by wage earners outside government that is exactly what they would do, in fact. And if video conferences were not paid for they would write letters. They are obviously slackers.
If the U.N. was really interested in reducing their carbon footprint they’d simply disband the whole thing and reduce their footprint to zero and we’d all be better off…. but I state the obvious.
A Real Example for the UN of a “CO2 Negative Office”
Redwood Tree House:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/n1won/5279151662/in/photostream/
Inside the Tree:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/n1won/5279152016/in/photostream/
A Candidate for the UN:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/n1won/5279152258/in/photostream/
The above example is cut down and on its side, but it still sequesters a lot of Carbon.
If it had been kept alive in place, it would continue to remove CO2 from the air and store carbon in its wood.
This idea has been “tongue in cheek”,
but this tree office would partially meet the task of being CO2 negative for the atmosphere.
I took photos out of the windows of the UN building in Geneva on 03.30.2012. Having examined all the ones that show grass, I can still see no sheep. Nor did I see any whilst I was there.
There was a big wooden chair outside that could do with fixing though.
The UN. UN-nations?
“Whilst” it’s nice that nations still have a forum to talk to each without losing face after they’ve severed diplomatic relations before they start shooting at each other, beyond that, what have they really done? Sucker kids into getting pennies for them instead of candy on Halloween?
“2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
The danger is that this clause of the US Contitution will be used to force us to obey some BS the UN comes up with.”all Treaties made”. We need to quit the UN. What have they really done for us?
Gunga Din,
Yes, we need to quit the UN and evict them from our shores.
And you commented that “it’s nice that nations still have a forum to talk to each without losing face after they’ve severed diplomatic relations before they start shooting at each other”. But the UN is not necessary for that, either. Before the UN existed, neutral countries like Switzerland fulfilled that function, and more effectively than the self-serving UN.
I can think of no reason whatever that we should be a part of that corrupt kleptocracy.
Willis
Not completely faceless.
http://www.greeningtheblue.org/case-study/greening-fao-role-environmental-coordinator
I believe Mrs Julie Claire McKenzie is both the former New Zealand Ambassador to Italy and surprise the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Ambassador as well. Before that I could not find anything.
Smokey says:
April 28, 2012 at 12:42 pm
Gunga Din,
Yes, we need to quit the UN and evict them from our shores.
And you commented that “it’s nice that nations still have a forum to talk to each without losing face after they’ve severed diplomatic relations before they start shooting at each other”. But the UN is not necessary for that, either. Before the UN existed, neutral countries like Switzerland fulfilled that function, and more effectively than the self-serving UN.
I can think of no reason whatever that we should be a part of that corrupt kleptocracy.
=================
No arguement.
“Whilst” and “while” are still used interchangeably in the UK but the former has apparently died out in the US. See also “among” vs “amongst” and “amid” vs “amidst.” I think the “st” on the end is used more in the written word, and the other versions are the spoken/colloquial variety.
For those wishing to learn more about Agenda 21 E.M.Smith did an excellent post on the subject at Chiefio – well worth reading .
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/foia-agenda-21/
In the age of the internet, the UN don’t need no d***ed buildings! Let these morons work from home and use GoToMeeting.
Jim, you asked above about Agenda 21. I wrote a post on it in February called Rio+20 Meets Agenda 21.
Part of the problem is that they wrap their naked power grab in such flowery language. For example, here’s a translation from my cited article:
So you won’t find something that says “we want to institute a world government with the power to control the least of your activities” … but if you read and translate the bureaucratese, that is exactly what they are saying.
w.
“”””” Gunga Din says:
April 28, 2012 at 12:32 pm
The UN. UN-nations?
“Whilst” it’s nice that nations still have a forum to talk to each without losing face after they’ve severed diplomatic relations before they start shooting at each other, “””””
The most recent occasion on which the United Nations succeeded in stopping people from shooting at each other was August 15 1945.
Since that day, the UN has been batting zero in peace keeping.
The Government already confiscates assets without a trial. The burden of proof of someone accussed of a crime to get their belongings back is up to them, and if you are left destitute, how do you get your assets back?
Catch 22, the Government seizes assets first, and does not return them after a not-guilty verdict.
Here is the official link to the Governments page:
http://www.justice.gov/jmd/afp/05participants/index.htm
An old article on how this was abused when it first came out:
http://www.fff.org/freedom/1093c.asp
And a page on this from WUWT of all place on land confiscation going right towards agenda 21: (you can read off the relevant parts of Agenda 21 and see it applied as per a local official in California.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/06/the-ugly-battle-between-rural-residents-and-alternative-energy-mandates-in-california/
There are plenty of places to find stories of people who lost their land or their property without due process. Whether this is according to Agenda 21 can be debated or whether its the American people simply losing their rights to their own property, but I think the story is clear on that score.
“”””” dp says:
April 28, 2012 at 11:01 am
The tailplane of a typically configured aircraft creates aerodynamic force that pushes downward, not upward, to provide flight stability. Putting more weight aft creates less requirement for downward aerodynamic force (lift = drag – even downward lift) and so provides for greater efficiency of that flying surface. It also unloads the main wing which also becomes more efficient. Taken too far the aircraft can become unstable, leading to an uncomfortable porpoising effect in flight. They probably deserve it. Regardless of where they sit the airlines try to configure the center of gravity for greatest safety and flight efficiency. “””””
So if we restrict our attention to the “lift anomaly” ; being good climbat scientists, we subtract out the fuselage lift as being a background more or less long term average; then the lift anomaly is solely due to the wings and the tail surfaces, and since you say that the tail surfaces PUSH DOWN, that be the jungle language for negative lift, then the entire lift anomaly has to be provided by the “main wing”, and any 4-H club lecture on mechanics, would explain that the net lift must be zero if the plane is maintaining altitude, then it is inescpable that the wing load must be increased if the tail surfaces are pushing down.
I submit that the tail surfaces are indeed providing positive lift, to overcome the gravimetric weight of the tail, so that the tail doesn’t crash, while the main wing surfaces are also providing positive lift to support the rest of the plane weight (less of course the fuselage lift )
The only pushing down (negative lift) is being done by gravity; and in fact that is PULLING DOWN rather than pushing. Any other pushing down, simply wastes fuel.
Willis: This will go down as one of your classics.
The UN is a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money: travel; yak-yak-yak; banquet; write report full of cliches – ad infinitum.
@ Willis Eschenbach says:
April 28, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Jim, you asked above about Agenda 21. I wrote a post on it in February called Rio+20 Meets Agenda 21.
Part of the problem is that they wrap their naked power grab in such flowery language. For example, here’s a translation from my cited article:
************************************************************************************
In a nutshell, it’s all about who is in charge. Nothing new there, been going on for millenia. So the only real question is who wins? And what does it take to win? Sun Tzu had a few things to say about that, as did many others. I suggest that the skeptic community could learn a lot about how to win by boning up on basic strategy. People should really understand that in the end, when diplomacy and “scientific” arguments and such don’t yield a win, naked force will determine the outcome. To ignore that is to admit defeat.
In this game, the most committed wins.
steveta_uk says: April 28, 2012 at 4:45 am
I like to refer to things according to how life *really* works. Therefore, I refer to “economy class” as STEERAGE. This is much more evocative considering how the passengers are packed in. Plus “steerage” also correctly reflects the manner in which the airlines (and the TSA) treat their customers.
Not so harmless. One of the major outputs is text for treaties and such, and when gov’ts sign on to them, bad things begin to happen. This is a several-steps extrapolated demonstration of the adage, “Elections have consequences.” So to the libraries full of agreements and international commitments said elected bodies are offered/urged/pushed to sign — by their very own Bureaucratic Corps, who object only when some of their own turf is threatened.
Danger, Pam Gray-Robinson!
typo: “so too the libraries…”
It could have been worse! It looks like the most recent good news communicated from “97% of Climate Neutral Scientists” by the UN’s newly minted “iconic” photo image “Vision” picturing the UN’s people so happily milling around and in a garbage bin is that sustainable production of Soylent Green can be achieved merely by “redistributing” all people over ~30-35 years old directly back to the remainder of the living! Or maybe only 4/5ths of such people. Whew, that was a close one! I almost had to go back to the Stone Age.
In this FAO document, Julie MacKenzie is represented as, “Her Excellency Julie C. MacKenzie, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of New Zealand to FAO. The document describes a meeting in Rome, by the way, that is a perfect exemplar of the pointless bureaucratic meanderings that cost money, produce nothing, and entertain many. One may be sure that Ms. MacKenzie saw the sights and enjoyed dining out while in Rome. All expenses paid.
September 2009 found Ms. MacKenzie in Geneva, Switzerland, where this pdf delegate list shows her in a most-serious confabulation about “Greening the UN.”
And here’s a good one: In 1998, Julie MacKenzie, as New Zealand Consul General, gave the opening address at Fifth OceaniaFoods conference held in Noumea, New Caledonia. Not Tahiti, but warm white sand beaches and appropriate diversions. I wonder why Sydney, AU wasn’t good enough. Inconveniently urban, maybe.
Paraphrasing Loius XIV, its good to be a politico-bureaucrat. What was that phrase? Oh, yeah: they did well by doing good. Ms. MacKenzie’s reality.
The UN… leading the world in sustainable jargon. Just look at all those impressive sounding titles… they must be so very important.
The only sustainability goal of the UN is sustainable spending.
Reblogged this on TaJnB | TheAverageJoeNewsBlogg.
My wife says “acrosst”, but she’s from New Jersey.
Louis Hooffsteter says:
April 28, 2012 at 4:02 am
What exactly does the U.N. do?
The United Nations itself has recently released reports documenting two of its worst stumbles.
Did they also mention that their own rules caused those “stumbles”? Ever since the debacles in the (former) Belgian Congo in the ’50s, UN Peacekeepers are allowed to carry weapons, but forbidden to have ammunition for them.
Curiousgeorge says:
April 28, 2012 at 4:25 pm
People should really understand that in the end, when diplomacy and “scientific” arguments and such don’t yield a win, naked force will determine the outcome. To ignore that is to admit defeat.
“Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.” — a quote from the Left’s favorite agrarian reformer, Mao Tse-Tung.
Or, if your sense of PC is too outraged by the old transliteration to concentrate on the aphorism, Mao Zedong…
Sheep grazing in enclosed grounds is standard practice in Switzerland. I remeber the sheep grazing on the grounds of CERN ( a world institute for high energy physics based in Geneva with extensive enclosed land) every spring thirty years ago . They arrived and left by truck of course, unlike the grazing of sheep in the rest of the world who are shepherded to the weeds on the mountains and hills, sometimes interrupting the traffic. I used to think :”how civilized” of the Swiss, now I should think “how sustainable”.
” and there is a very good reason for him saying nothing about that:
UN CO2 emissions in 2009: 1.7 million tonnes.
UN CO2 emissions in 2010: 1.8 million tonnes”
Yeah. They are supposed to lead by example since they’re the promoter of Agenda 21 sustainable living, etc. When do we see all UN buildings outfitted with their wonderful GW/CC Gaia saving Solar panels and wind powered generators.
Plus they’d be driving around in Toyota Prius’s as their UN fleet vehicles. Don’t know how they go off the beaten track in parts of Africa carrying aid supplies. 🙂
Not a lot of “cultural diversity” displayed in that photo. Or are all Caucasians subject to recycling at the whim of the UN?
My younger leisure days was spent designing and flying model aircraft, and this gives one a good sense of flight control. The wing provides the lift, all of the lift, the tail and tailplane provide stability and control in flight in forward flight. Testing a craft full of radio gear meant holding each wingtip with outstretched hands, sliding a fingertip until the maximum curvature of the upper surface was reached (the point of maximum lift) and then adjusting the cargo until a level parallel to the ground is reached.
In real aircraft, any departure from this principle would result in inefficient flying, increased drag and higher fuel cost.
Sorry, can’t think of a sheep comment, leave it to the NZers.
Sadly, I do not think the USA could get out of the UN now. With our debt to China, dependence on imports from many nations and oil from the Mideast, etc., if we tried to get out of the UN,these and other countries would wage political and economic war on the USA. With $15 trillion debt as of now, we are not in a good position do do anything.
dp says:
April 28, 2012 at 11:01 am
The tailplane of a typically configured aircraft creates aerodynamic force that pushes downward, not upward, to provide flight stability.
Any negative lift generated by the stabilizers is miniscule compared to the weight of the empennage itself, the sole function of which is to serve as a counterbalance to the massive weight of the ego contained in the cockpit.
That only applies to fixed-wing aircraft, of course…
“We’re gonna need a bigger bin”
Jeff Alberts says:
April 28, 2012 at 7:13 pm
“My wife says “acrosst”, but she’s from New Jersey.”
Now that is really funny!
I made this commnet in “Global Warming: Science or Politics?” but seems to fit here also.
(Mods, is copying old comments frowned upon? If so, I apologize.)
Gunga Din says:
April 28, 2012 at 10:22 am
Have you ever read “Animal Farm”? It was written as an allegory of what happened with the communist revolution. There’s an animated version that you can find online. The animated version has the animals rise up again at the end. That doesn’t happen in the book.
I think it is also an allegory for any kind of class warfare. “The rich” versus “the poor”. Some of “the poor” want to be “the rich”. They would take what “the rich” have for themselves and make “the rich” into “the poor”. All that has changed is the names of who is “the rich” and who is “the poor”. The same goes power. Some aren’t satisfied having power and authority, over their own lives. They want to have power and authority over others. Some of those will use any means to achieve that goal.
The “environment” has, for this lady (and the UN), become Napoleon’s (from Animal Farm) windmill. It doesn’t matter whether or not we’re really changing the weather as long as it can be used to further the cause.
Gunga Din says:
April 28, 2012 at 12:32 pm
The danger is that this clause of the US Contitution will be used to force us to obey some BS the UN comes up with.”all Treaties made”. We need to quit the UN. What have they really done for us?
Wow! The Supremacy Clause in the US constitution in effect says that a treaty could be made by the US which would invalidate the rights granted the citizens by the constitution.
The US constitution is not a guarantee of citizens rights. These rights are subordinate to .”all Treaties made”, and the courts are duty bound to interpret the laws in this fashion.
Alberta Slim says:
April 28, 2012 at 10:53 am
This is about Maurice Strong who started the whole thing about CAGW.
This article shows $$ links between Strong, Gore, Obama, Goldman Sachs, the Joyce foundation and CAGW.
http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/Columnists/A_Time_For_Choosing/BARACK_OBAMA_AL_GORE_GOLDMAN_SACHS_AND_THE_GREATEST_SWINDLE_IN_HUMAN_HISTORY/29819
“Whilst”? Who says “whilst” these days?
Millions and millions of Brits – often using “while” to connote something like “at the same time as”, and “whilst”, something perhaps nearer to “although”. So they might say: “While I was doing that, I was also watching the television”, but then again, “Whilst I accept what you are saying, nonetheless it’s no excuse for your behaviour”.
It’s not that frequent, imo, to hear “whilst” used in the first sense, as in the UN quote; it’s possibly more common in the written than the spoken word.
Do the sheep get little blue helmets? Protection from all the climate BS flighing about, you know.
@JamesS who said: “@DBCooper. Your post is a joke, right?”
And what would the joke be? That list is one-third of the “UN openings” in Nairobi posted at http://unjobs.org/duty_stations/nbo for jobs closing in the next two months. It points to an incredibly bloated bureaucracy. I grant you that this is not an official UN list of jobs, but take away all the jobs that are clearly part of the UN and leave the NGOs, World bank, etc. Would Kenya suffer the loss?
No joke. I have worked as a consultant for UNDP in Peru. The people I met were nothing more than paper pushers. Poor ones, at that. But they had a cushy job and that’s all they expected.
To support Craig Goodrich: (Willis and his scornful “who uses whilst any more?”!!)
Lots of Brits! There are still vestiges of the language of Shakespeare around – even if they never made it across the Atlantic.
For those of you who don’t know squat about how conventional aircraft fly and particularly the role of the tailplane (and that appears to be everyone who has commented but me) I suggest reading Wolfgang Langewiesche’s “Stick and Rudder”. Or read the infallible 🙂 Wikipedia article on static stability here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_static_stability
Len says:
April 28, 2012 at 11:18 pm
Sadly, I do not think the USA could get out of the UN now. With our debt to China, dependence on imports from many nations and oil from the Mideast, etc., if we tried to get out of the UN,these and other countries would wage political and economic war on the USA. With $15 trillion debt as of now, we are not in a good position do do anything.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
I understand what you’re saying, but are we in a good position to continue down this road? “They” won’t be happy until we are subjugate to them, until your paycheck furthers their causes, even more than it does now.
(OK. I know I’m entering “snip” territory.)
I want to live “a quite and peaceable life” as it says in 1 Timothy 2:2. I want to be able to tell you that I believe God raised Christ from the dead and not have you be able to have me thrown in jail. I want you to be able to tell me that you think he was just a nice Jewish boy who went into his father’s business without me being able to have you thrown into jail. In a country like Iran, either statement could get us executed. (End of “snip” territory,)
Do you want the leader of Iran to have a vote in you’re everyday life?
I don’t know the UN’s finances, but I think their schemes would be severlly hampered without $$ from the US. If not, what is our freedom worth? I’m willing to pay for freedom. I’m not willing to pay for a hockey slick.
Its about time that we fold up the UN and send these useless clowns packing.
If we leave the UN it will isolate us from the UN marketplace. That will be driven by CIBA, Russia, and France.
Len and dp,
You have it entirely backward. The U.S. is the world’s marketplace, not the UN. The whole world wants to sell their goods and services in America. We hold the economic cards, not the UN — which is just a parasite on American taxpayers. They hate us, but they take our money. As a taxpayer I demand that we stop all financial asistance to the corrupt UN. If a country needs help, we can help them without the UN middlemen taking their usual fat cut.
ferd berple says:
April 29, 2012 at 5:45 am
“… the rights granted the citizens by the constitution.”
You couldn’t be more wrong about this. The Constitution does not grant any rights to the citizens. The citizens have all the rights. The Constitution sets the limited powers the citizens grant to the government. The 9th and 10th Amendments were written to ensure there could be no misunderstanding about this. Unfortunately after years of indoctrination too many people believe as you, that the government grants rights to people. I fear all hope is lost.
dp says:
April 29, 2012 at 12:24 pm
For those of you who don’t know squat about how conventional aircraft fly and particularly the role of the tailplane (and that appears to be everyone who has commented but me)
I had a hunch you were a starched-wing rather than a fling-wing pilot…
dp says:
April 29, 2012 at 12:24 pm ,
That wiki article said
……. pretty close to what I said. Really, an aircraft should be stable and not pitch in a variety of airspeeds, slow (take-off/landing) or cruise, the craft should be longitudinally stable.
Still couldn’t fit sheep in…..
Sorry I forgot to add a small point on April 28, 2012 at 6:20 am:
The pronunciation of “Ban”, when at the start of a sentence, is very close to “pun” as pronounced by English people. When somewhere in a sentence “Ban” is pronounced as English “bun”.
Keith Minto says:
April 29, 2012 at 10:50 pm
Really, an aircraft should be stable and not pitch in a variety of airspeeds, slow (take-off/landing) or cruise, the craft should be longitudinally stable.
Still couldn’t fit sheep in…..
“…slow (take-off/landing) or cruise, the craft should be longitudinally stable, like a sheep.”
Done.
Some time ago, I decided to read a large number of UN reports that are available on their website. Just to see what was in them. One thing I did not see was any reports of any significant grants going to any citizens of any countries, which honestly surprised me. They get billlions in funding and what do they do with it? I expected to hear about projects and grants to set up water systems, housing, you know community support and infra-structure. The only fundig I found were tiny four figure grants at best. I also saw no actual financial reports. None. Nada. And one particular report reporting that the UN dept being reported about was effective and useful. Go figure.
Anyway, what I did read a great deal about in these UN reports was something termed “creating capacity”, “building capacity”, etc. It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally think I figured it out. The capacity they were building was within their organisations and their budgets. This was aroud the time of the Copenhagen meeting where Pachauri boldly asked for up to 3% of global GDP. They were all drooling about how they could expand their organisations to intake and spend all this green coming their way.
LOL. Good times.