Cherries Were Sweet, Wormy, and Juicy

It is high season for cherries, and I find them every time I go to the grocery store. They are red, plump, juicy, and quite expensive. But none as expensive as we found them in June in Calgary, Canada, a farming town. I asked the locals why their cherries were 26 Canadian dollars a kilogram and was told that there was a shortage; the crop was smaller because the weather had been colder than usual, and cherries need heat to ripen.

So much for the non-stop global warming drivel and the need to eliminate CO2 from any human activity by 2030. Yet plants and trees need CO2 to grow, it is the gas of plant life. Nurseries add extra CO2 in their green houses in order to grow plants much faster. And we exhale CO2.

I did not purchase the expensive cherries in Calgary although I was tempted. I reached for their compostable grocery bags and then I decided against buying them and bought apples instead.

Our local Wegman’s carries cherries from California most days for $2.99 per pound and organic or yellow ones for $6.99 per pound. Even at the price of $12.99 per pound, they flew off the shelves in early June. Locals, government bureaucrats who inhabit this area, can afford to pay high prices for everything – apartments, gas, high-end EVs like Tesla, and very expensive homes.

I filled my bowl with red cherries and took them on the deck; they glistened in the sunlight in rich hues of ripened red. Within minutes a bee appeared out of the nowhere, attracted by the fruity fresh scent.

As I ate one and the fruit released its sweet juice, I was reminded of my childhood cherries, infested by fruit flies with their worms. They crawled inside the fruit and burrowed their eggs. We ate them anyway, we were so starved for fresh fruits and vegetables.

My friend Joe K., who served a while at the Embassy in Bucharest, told me the story of one Friday evening, when several friends gathered at his home to watch a VHS movie and he picked up a large bag of cherries which he placed on the kitchen table. As his wife went into the kitchen to bring the guests bowls of cherries, Joe heard a scream. He ran to the kitchen to check on his wife and found her staring grossed out at the kitchen table now crawling with hundreds of white worms which had emerged from the bag of cherries.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever eating a fruit, any fruit, during my childhood in communist Romania that was not burrowed inside by worms. Cherries in June and July were sweet, wormy, and juicy, and we ate them anyway.

I feel privileged and extremely lucky to live in this country where I can eat fruits free of fruit flies and their worms, especially cherries, apples, peaches, and prunes. 

Yet one day, I was in Shoppers in Fairfax, Virginia, and the cherry stand was buzzed by fruit flies and did not smell very well. I did not purchase any and left the store immediately, extremely disappointed. The abundance we used to experience once is no longer the same all over America.

Wormy Banana (a repost)

My 80-year old mom is sitting at the kitchen table dissecting a banana as if it was a biology specimen under a microscope. I watch her for a few minutes intently before I ask her what she is doing. With a scientific look of Eureka discovery on her face, she tells me, she is looking for worms. Worms? She is 100 percent sure; the bananas I just bought at the grocery store have worms, especially since they had ripened enough to be extra sweet and mushy. She is peeling away and separating the banana core into smaller segments, believing that the tiny white fibers are worms.

I started to explain that they do not, but I stopped short. Mom spent most of her adult life in the Eastern European block where fruit flies were rampant and uncontrollable. Insecticides such as DDT, although banned in this country, were used on most crops and vegetables low to the ground, but it was difficult to spray powder on fruit trees in order to kill the pests that loved fruits as much as we did. Crop dusting by aerial spraying was not something the communist regime did. There was plenty manual labor around. The population needed employment in spite of the meager wages. Workers dusted or sprayed the chemicals themselves without masks or any protection for that matter.

I do not remember ever eating a fruit that did not have worms in it. Fruit flies deposited their eggs that grew into tiny, white worms that wiggled out of cherries, apples, pears, prunes, peaches, apricots as we took bites out of them. We could try to extricate the worms by cutting the fruit into sections without parasites in them, or could just eat it whole and unwashed, not worrying or thinking about the worms. They constituted, after all, extra protein, and we were starved for protein all the time. We were not vegetarians by choice. Meat was so hard to find except at Christmas time when country folks slaughtered pigs and the government supplied stores in town with extra meat in order to pacify the starving urban proletariat.

There were a few orchards slated for communist elite consumption or export and those were tended to carefully. The fruit was whole and untouched by parasitic fruit flies.

During Christmas holidays, small shipments of oranges and bananas came from Greece, Israel, and people fought over them in long lines at the state grocery store. Such rare delicacies were rationed to a few pieces per family. We were so excited to get the exotic fruits and free of worms!

There were no 10 pound bags of oranges similar to those we buy at Sam’s Club and no neat rows of perfect oranges or bunches of bananas like those that we find in American grocery stores every day. We take the abundance for granted because we have never experienced shortages of anything. We trust that whatever we need, will always be there, someone will grow them and ship them to our markets. But will they?

Mom finished her inspection of the “imperfect” banana. She threw it out with a huff, convinced that it had worms. Mom is blessed to have plenty of other food or fruits to satisfy her hunger. By the grace of God and a stroke of good luck, she lives in the land of plenty. She does not have to worry about her next meal. She has the luxury of throwing away good food that she mislabels wormy, tainted, or rotten. After all, there is so much food in this country and so cheap. Will we always be so lucky and have this luxury forever?

 

 

 

 

Preserving History or Purging It

When it comes to history in school, most of us forget important events and dates as soon as we complete the course, pass the exams and get a passing grade. We use the excuse that life is too short and complicated – why bother to remember things and people who had long been dead and gone. What is there to learn? However, if we don’t learn from history, if we neglect it, or even worse, change it to suit current ideologies and those in power, we no longer know where we came from, who we are, we lose that important connection to the past, and fail to appreciate the significant contributions famous men and women have made to humanity that still impact our lives today. We also fail to learn from the lessons of those who lived in infamy.

If we do not remember and respect past people and events, good or bad, we are bound to repeat disastrous mistakes. There are so many lessons to be learned from history! But we will not learn if we ban books, monuments, destroy buildings, archeological evidence, flags, statues, tombs, memorabilia, and factual evidence of humanity’s past existence.

Take for example, the millions of farmers, peasants, and workers who met their end under Stalin’s rule. The youth of today seem to idolize the system of abject fear and communist enslavement he established for millions of his own people. He terrorized countless innocents who refused to submit to his communist oppression or dared to criticize him; he eventually used mass terror against his own party members.

Stalin eliminated those he considered rivals to power by using “the organized terror of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” One such victim was Sergei M. Kirov, assassinated under mysterious circumstances. A member of the Politburo, Kirov was a direct threat to Stalin’s leadership. Kirov had been a friend of the exiled Leon Trotsky.

There were three distinct waves of his terror prior to WWII. The Communist Party forced a campaign in 1935 to “screen out undesirable elements and ‘enemies of the party.’”

1.      The communist purges continued in 1936 with the “show trials.” A feature of the communist “justice,” the guilt of the accused was predetermined, and the courtroom drama served only as a medium to communicate a propaganda message” for the gullible and fearful public. The accused were forced to sign fake confessions, then were sentenced to death based on these forced confessions and shot immediately. A few received life prison sentences in Siberian gulags. Most of the condemned died eventually in these gulags from poor nutrition, exposure to the elements, torture, and severe work conditions.

2.      In 1937 came the liquidation of the “enemies of the state” in the Soviet Army, Navy, and Air Force. The manufactured excuse was that they had spied for Germany and Japan. As a result of this purge, most of the Soviet marshals, generals, and colonels, and 30,000 lower rank officers had been killed. The military purge was murder of innocents but also ill-advised a year before the start of World War II.

3.      The third “show trial” occurred in March 1938 in which the head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda, along with other 20 defendants, who produced the “confessions of the first show trials, were also accused as “enemies of the state.”

Stalin had executed the “11 men of October” who helped the Bolsheviks seize power in 1917. Stalin also killed all his former associates who had been members of Lenin’s Politburo. The only person who escaped his murderous rampage was Trotsky because he was in exile.

A few victims received public hearings, but most were executed summarily without trial, just based on having been questioned by the secret police.

Stalin stood unchallenged because he had consolidated the dictatorship of the proletariat. He assumed the power of the Central Committee and had absolute control of the organization that had absolute control of the Soviet Union. There was no opposition left, he killed them all, and hired only people who were intimidated into submission subordinates. One such subordinate was Nikita S. Khrushchev, who managed the purge in Ukraine.

J. Edgar Hoover wrote that “once the Communist party, itself a minority dictatorship, had taken control of the government, there was no problem in justifying its minority dictatorship over the state.”

After the successful October 1917 Revolution, the Russian Communists began the preparation of an international revolution which was meant to establish “a single world society.” That idea is heavily promoted around the globe today under the United Nation’s one world government.

The Soviet government even appropriated 2 million rubles “for the needs of the revolutionary internationalist movement.” The organization tasked with imposing communism on the entire world was the Communist International, or Comintern, conceived by Vladimir I. Lenin. He believed that Soviet communism would not succeed if he failed in initiating communism in Western Europe.

Documents show that a Soviet courier was arrested in 1920 in Berlin, carrying a message to the communists in the United States.

As luck would have it, the Americans did not wait very long to start their own Bolshevik/Marxist movement in September 1919 in Chicago, Illinois, of all places. They organized not one but two communist parties – the Communist Labor Party (formed by native-born Americans) and the Communist Party of America (formed by foreign-born residents). The two parties did not unite because the Russian members were against the Communist Labor Party. They eventually united in 1921 after the intervention of the Comintern. But the idea of American exceptionalism promoted by the Communist Labor Party was always a thorn in the side of the Communist International.

Fast forward a century later in the United States and Lenin’s goal to success is closer than ever, thanks to American academia, the mainstream media, corrupt politicians drunk on power and wealth, and the public-school indoctrination by Marxist teachers and administrators, themselves propagandized in U.S. universities that were seeded with Marxism by German emigrees from the Frankfurter Schule who taught in teacher colleges in New York and around the country. And the communist propaganda continues today thanks to Colleges of Education around the country, churning out Marxist teachers and administrators.

The purging of history, of historical figures, of monuments, names, graves, and other memorabilia has accelerated to the point that even a monument from Arlington National Cemetery, dedicated to Civil War reconciliation, will be destroyed on Monday, July 24, 2023. The memorial plaque from Washington & Lee University, mentioning Traveller, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s famous and beloved horse, has been removed. Grave of Robert E. Lee's Horse Desecrated, Plaque to Beloved Traveller Removed - His Glory.Me

Peter Westbrook wisely said, “So much of our future [depends] on preserving our past.” We should heed his advice.

The Global Constitution for the World

The call for a Constitutional Convention of States under Article V of the U.S. Constitution grows louder. Governments are eager to institute digital currency and, to do so, the U.S. must modify the Constitution. The pretext used is the desire to reign in the out-of-control government spending and corruption in Congress.

Proponents of such convention even found escapees from communist regimes and are using them to make public statements that such a convention would prevent communism from taking hold in this country, a ludicrous idea.

Aside from the fact that communism has already taken hold in the U.S. and grown exponentially, people fail to mention the real possibility of a runaway convention where the Constitution would be replaced with one already written and at the ready, waiting to be adopted and deployed.

One such constitution is the Draft International Covenant on Environment, initially named the Draft Covenant on Environment and Development (D.I.C.E.D.) which prompted me to write in my book, U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy, that it is the environmental constitution of global governance, and that our rights will be diced in every way imaginable if this global constitution will ever be adopted. It has already been issued in five editions, in 1994, 2000, 2004, 2010, and 2015. The fifth version has 83 articles and 238 pages.

All signatory nations, including the U.S., would become centrally planned, socialist countries in which all decisions would be made within the framework of Sustainable Development, the lynchpin of U.N. Agenda 2030.

“The Draft International Covenant on Environment is an ongoing contribution of the International Council of Environmental Law (ICEL) and the IUCN Environmental Law Programme (IUCN ELP) to provide a framework for implementing sustainability at all levels of society following the outcome of the Rio+20 Conference, and subsequent adoption of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Draft International Covenant is a blueprint for an international framework (or umbrella) agreement consolidating and developing existing legal principles related to environment and development. Over the 20 years since the first edition was prepared by leading experts from all regions of the globe, the 5^th Edition continues the tradition as a ‘living document’ having undergone four revisions to ensure that it is up to date with the newest developments in the field of public international law.” 

This document is presented with the stated goal …”to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We recognize the spirit of cooperation that has characterized negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals and provide the updated Covenant as a framework for implementing sustainability at all levels of society.”

Along with many U.S. professors of law, biology, natural resources, urban planning, theology, environmental ethics, two attorneys, a judge, foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, 13 members of the U.N. Secretariat, who contributed to the development and writing of this document, Dinah Shelton, Aaron Laur, and the Elisabeth Haub Foundation for Environmental Law are thanked for their contributions and publication of this Draft Covenant by Dr. Wolfgang E. Burhenne, former Chairman and now Executive Governor (2006-present) of the International Council of Environmental Law. www.iucn.org/work/programmes/environmental.law

The covenant (D.I.C.E.D.) also contains the related “gateway to environmental law,” ECOLEX. Draft International Covenant on Environment and Development: implementing sustainability - resource | IUCN

“ECOLEX is a web-based information service that synergizes information on environmental law collected by the three partner organizations, 185,235 laws and regulations, 2,182 treaties, and 2,592 court decisions.”

ECOLEX “covers the entire spectrum of environmental and natural resources conservation, including fresh and marine water, air and atmosphere, soil and land use, species and ecosystems, fisheries and forestry, hazardous substances and waste, as well as food and agriculture.” ECOLEX - resource | IUCN

The large and complex Covenant document includes articles that deal with every aspect of economic activity. Some notable articles are:

-          Integrated planning system, not considering administrative boundaries within a country, and is based on Paragraph 10.5 of U.N. Agenda 21, which seeks to “facilitate allocation of land to the uses that provide the greatest sustainable benefits and to promote the transition to a sustainable and integrated management of land resources.” The impact assessment procedure is developed by the World Bank.

“Aquifers, drainage basins, coastal, marine areas, and any areas called ecological units must be taken into account when allocating land for municipal, agricultural, grazing, forestry, and other uses.”

-          Agricultural subsidies are discouraged, as well as subsidizing private enterprises.

-          Respect for all life forms.

-          Entire globe should be under “the protection of international law.”

-          Equity and justice are paramount, code words for socialism/communism.

-          All member nations must adopt environmental conservation into all national decisions.

-          Stratospheric Ozone: Rex communis is the customary international law regime applicable to areas beyond national jurisdiction, to the high seas and outer space.

-          All nations must mitigate the adverse effects of climate change. Signatories who ratify this document will have to fight a non-existent man-made climate change.

-          Eradication of poverty must be achieved through the spreading of wealth from developed countries to developing countries whose bureaucrats are running the United Nations.

-          Consumption and production patterns must be controlled.

-          Recycling is mandatory.

-          Demographic policies: countries must calculate “the size of the human population their environment is capable of supporting and to implement measures that prevent the population from exceeding that level.” In a Malthusian view, this document implies that the out-of-control multiplication of humans can endanger the environment.

-          Open and non-discriminatory international trading system in which pricing is not based on the capitalist supply and demand but reflect the full direct and indirect social and environmental costs (ESG) of their extraction, production, transport, marketing, and where appropriate, ultimate disposal.” (Perhaps they should have serious talks with the solar and wind energy proponents.)

-          Trans-boundary environmental effects - transboundary natural resources will be conserved quantitatively and qualitatively. Conserve means managing human-induced processes and activities which may be damaging to natural systems.

-          Physical planning must follow “an integrated approach to land use – infrastructure, highways, railways, waterways, dams, and harbors. Town and country planning must include land use plans elaborated at all levels of government.”

-          Sharing benefits of Biotechnology is a similar requirement to the Law of the Sea Treaty which demands that final products of research and development be used freely, no matter who develops an idea or how much it costs to bring that idea to the market.

-          Signatory nations must pay for these requirements and a specific percentage of GDP for Official Development Assistance.

-          Settlement of disputes must be done by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the International Court of Justice, and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. They will supersede any other courts, including those in the U.S.

The existence of a constitution for global governance puts in proper perspective the danger that existing Constitutions of sovereign states face under the aggressive Great Reset of U.N. Agenda 2030.

The highly coordinated national effort in the U.S. to call a constitutional convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, for the first time in history, is very close to victory, six states short of the required 34-states. The result of such a convention of states would be “a complete overhaul of the U.S. Constitution.” Which constitution will replace it if that happens?

“Our Common Agenda”

Environmentalists

United Nations’ Road map to total globalist control, following the morphing of U.N. Agenda 21 (1992) into the U.N. Agenda 2030, has now taken the dangerous road to “Our Common Agenda” as expressed by U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. Secretary-General’s report on “Our Common Agenda” (un.org)

The United Nations General Assembly will host a summit in New York on September 22-23, 2024. The organizers are promoting the ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’ to “strengthen global governance for the sake of present and future generations.” Nobody asked present generations, nor did they get the chance to vote, if they wanted to be ruled by global governance bodies at the United Nations. Event: Summit of the Future | SDG Knowledge Hub | IISD

The invited participants of the Summit of the Future, U.N. member states, “U.N. agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations, academic institutions, the private sector, and youth,” are expected to “forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like.” As we know, a consensus of any kind is just a small group of like-minded and left-leaning people who agree on certain issues and force their consensus onto the masses as if it is what billions of humans wanted.

Nobody bothered to define “civil society organizations” either, but it is obvious that the list of attendees includes mostly leftist organizations and leftist individuals who have no particular interest in learning or accepting what the 8 billion people of this planet want or vote for. The invitees know what is best for the rest of the world and the world must do their bidding or else. Would the population at large be excluded from this “civil society” if they disagree?

At the Summit of the Future, the participant countries and individuals are expected to agree to, promote, and implement the 12 listed commitments which happen to align with most of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of U.N. Agenda 2030. Common_Agenda_Key_Proposals_English.pdf (un.org)

1.      Leave no one behind:

-          social contract attached to human rights.

-          universal social protection (What kind of protection would that be, and would we be happy about it when we own nothing in order to spread the wealth to others?)

-          basic income security (Who decides what constitutes security for so many different and diverse individuals and families?)

-          universal healthcare for 4 billion “unprotected” (Who exactly will be delivering this universal healthcare, in which hospitals and clinics, and will these 4 billion be screened?)

-          adequate housing, decent work (Who decides what is “adequate” housing and how do they define “decent” work? What are the parameters?)

-          digital inclusivity (Would jail inmates be included? Would white men and Christians be included?)

-          complementary measures to GDP (What exactly are those measures? Theft of wealth and redistribution to the developing world of ‘excess’ GDP?)

2.      Protect our planet, i.e., the global green new deal:

-          1.5-degree Celsius and net-zero emissions by 2050 or sooner

-          declare climate emergency and provide package of support to developing countries.

-          no new coal after 2021 and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies (The logical assumption would be that wind and solar energy subsidies would get larger and larger while land would be taken out of agricultural production to deploy the wind turbines and solar panels.)

-          carbon pricing mechanisms by financial actors (Who are these actors? The same ones receiving wind and solar energy subsidies?)

-          transforming food systems for sustainability (Eat bugs and fake meat?) in nutrition and fairness (Who decides what is fair?)

-          resolve environmental displacement (Open all borders and delete sovereignty?)

3.      Promote peace and prevent conflicts:

-          Place women and girls at the center (Perhaps they will finally define what a woman is.)

-          Application of human rights online (Global control of internet?)

-          Legal identity for all, end statelessness, protection of internally displaced persons, refugees, and migrants (Nobody is illegal anymore and nations will be borderless while former citizenship will become irrelevant.)

-          New visions for the rule of law (No longer the laws of your country but the laws of the global government?)

-          Reshape responses to all forms of violence (A global police and military?)

-          Peaceful, secure, and sustainable use of outer space (Who will control outer space? U.N. stakeholders?)

4.      Abide by international law and ensure justice:

-          Universal access to the Internet as a human right (Who is paying for it and who is controlling it?)

-          Human rights on a more sustainable financial footing (Who is footing the bill and who decides?)

-          Global road map to implement international law (Will each country’s laws then become obsolete?)

5.      Place women and girls at the center:

-          Repeal discriminatory laws (We do not discriminate in the U.S. except against while males now)

-          Promote gender parity through quotas and special measures (Sound like gender-based affirmative action. What special measures? Who will vote for such special measures and what are they?)

 

6.      Build trust:

-          Global code of conduct that promotes integrity in public information (Is this the conduct as implemented by the Chinese scoring system?)

-          Improve people’s experiences with public institutions and basic services.

-          Inclusive national listening and “envisioning the future” exercises (Sounds like communist propagandist oppression. Who does the “envisioning of the future”? NGOs sanctioned by the United Nations? And what is “national listening”?)

-          Action to tackle corruption in line with the United Nations Convention against Corruption

-          Reformed international tax system (Will this international tax system supersede a nation’s tax system, or will it be an additional tax?)

-          Joint structure on financial integrity and tackling illicit financial flows (Who defines what is and what is not “illicit financial flows”?)

 

7.      Improve digital cooperation:

-          Connect all people to the Internet (Who pays? Control of all people, their digital currency, and all assets)

-          Avoid Internet fragmentation (Total control of the Internet in the hands of U.N.?)

-          Protect data (Control of everything and everyone)

-          Apply human rights online (Control of free speech on social platforms)

-          Introduce accountability criteria for discrimination and misleading content (Internet jail and control of people’s thoughts, no more free speech?)

-          Promote regulation of artificial intelligence (That should go over well with the technocracy unless they are in on the U.N. control.)

-          Digital commons as a global public good (Who decides the worth of this global public good, United Nations or the corporatist technocrats, and who opens and shuts the valve of free speech, contravening the U.S. Constitution?)

 

8.      Upgrade the United Nations:

-          Behavioral Science (ESG, environmental social governance, including the Chinese reward/punishment system for good/bad behavior?)

-          High-level Advisory Board led by former Heads of State and Government on improved governance of global public goods.

-          More listening, participation, and consultation (including digitally)

-          Gender parity within the United Nations system by 2028

-          Re-establish the Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board (Bureaucrats from developing nations?)

 

9.      Ensure sustainable financing:

-          Improve the U.N. budget process (Throw more American taxpayer dollars out the window and into the U.N. coffers through various schemes.)

-          Fairer trading system

 

10.   Boost partnerships:

-          U.N. meetings with regional organizations (Watch out if you have been affected by ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, who, with other U.N.-sanctioned NGOs have brought to your cities and towns all sorts of land, agriculture, real estate, and development control.)

-          Stronger engagement between the United Nations system, international financial institutions, and regional development banks (More banking schemes to redistribute wealth from developed nations to developing nations and the United Nations itself.)

-          More systematic engagement with parliaments, subnational authorities and the private sector (Watch out for your local and state representatives who have unwittingly or deliberately brought U.N. rules and NGO partnerships to you, changing what you can and cannot do with your farm, home, yard, property, rivers, ponds, trees, bushes, roads, water collection, water use, building, natural gas, dairy farming, cars, other forms of transportation, hospitals, golf courses, parks, etc.)

 

11.  Listen to and work with the youth:

-          Remove barriers to political participation and measure progress through a “youth in politics” index (This is the same youth living in parents’ basements, preoccupied on Tik Tok with narcissistic selfies and videos.)

 

12.  Be prepared:

-          Strategic Foresight and Global Risk Report by the United Nations every five years

-          Global vaccination plan (They have not injured enough people yet with the Wuhan flu vaccines.)

-          Empowered WHO (What a horrible idea!)

-          Stronger global health security and preparedness (Is that going to include the infamous green vaccination cards to be allowed to travel?)

-          Accelerate product development and access to health technologies in low- and middle-income countries (Americans pay excessive costs for drugs, while the developing world gets them for free or for pennies on the dollar?)

-          Universal health coverage and addressing determinants of health (Who decides? A global health coverage in the Obama style, the Affordable Care Act of 2010, insurance that nobody could really afford except those who receive it for free?)

“Our common future” looks bleak for western civilization, forced to redistribute their hard-earned earnings and wealth to the developing world, to relinquish constitutional freedoms to a global elite that knows what is best for humanity, and to bow to the global governance under the aegis of the United Nations, a developing world bureaucracy lavishly supported by the American taxpayers.