In-Cog-Nito

The UN is for lazy people

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On the way home, I listened to a good interview on the radio with Jed Babbin promoting his new book Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think. The book sounds promising, but based on Amazon reviews, it’s more of a quick summary rather than an in-depth review.

Part of his thesis is that the UN takes traditional diplomacy and puts it into a useless debating forum without action. Babbin argues that because no action is taken, the UN actually makes war more likely. This got me thinking, perhaps there is a simple reason why leftists love the UN – they’re lazy. The UN wants to be the socialist government for the world. Take the world and put it into one centralized pot. But like all socialist governments, this breeds laziness and freedom from responsibility. Why try if the U.N. will take care of it? Got a problem? Leave it up to the U.N. If not their selling point, it’s the model they want to create.

Why do leftists love socialism? Because they don’t have to work. No job? Don’t worry, the government will take care of it. Got a problem? Leave it up to the government. When you look at its track record, the U.N. hasn’t done much in terms of results. But I think for the left, it presents an easy out. Lazy…

One of my favorite Winston Churchill quotes is “We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” It captures the essence of the fighting spirit of old. If diplomacy fails, F-U we’ll go it alone.

Here’s my leftist translation of the same quote: “We shall take it to the U.N.; we shall seek to pass resolutions against it; we shall study it in committees and subcommittees; we shall invoke clauses and bylaws; we shall never act unilaterally.”

Not exactly the stuff that captures the imagination.

One Lefty’s Answer

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Since I live in the San Francisco area, there was a radio show on the channel following football by a gay host named Karel. I left it on to hear what he said. His answer to the Democrats’ dilema?

1. Examine and talk about the personal grief George W’s victory is causing among Liberals.

2. Get back to the Democrats’ roots. This is no time to compromise with the Red states. Democrats should emphasize even more that religion has absolutely no place in American politics.

Wow, move even more to the left. That’s going to work out well… The Dem’s have no clue. I hope he stays on the air and his message gets across.

Update: As a sidenote, a belated quote of the day from Ann Coulter : “Whatever happened to all those gays who wanted to join the military? We haven’t heard a peep out of them lately.”

As evidenced by Karel, radical gays have a visceral hatred of Bush. But don’t they realize if the Islamo-fascists take over they would be among the first ones executed as degenerates?

Quid pro quo

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So I’ve left the bowels of Big 4 accounting and moved over to the corporate/in-house finance side of things. With my new job, the budgets for our lobbying and corporate giving activities fall under my area of responsibility. One of our goals is to sell software to NATO and NATO expansion countries. Speaking with our guy in charge of lobbying, it seems the European way has evolved into quid pro quo for giving: if you are an American company wanting to bid for European government contracts, you better have a long and distinguished list of European charities to which you have donated substantial sums of money. Monterey Bay Aquarium won’t quite cut it.

Governments have every right to promote what’s good for their countries. This would be similar to the U.S. government wanting to buy from U.S. companies. But I think when the U.S. government awards contracts, in terms of what’s good for the U.S., we tend to care more about how many jobs it creates. We tend to want to steer money towards domestic expansion, or at least expansion of the tax base. This European quid pro quo isn’t quite extortion in giving a bribe to a magistrate to ease the way. But for some reason it just has a dirty feel about it. For me, nonprofits, government, and academia run in the same circle. You have the same mindset and people who work there, ensconced comfortably in a bureaucracy of inefficiency. Can’t work? Go teach. Can’t teach? Go govern. Can’t govern? Go ask for money. It’s one big mass of socialist utopia where there is little accountability and a lack of quantifiable measures of success. When you throw Eurocrats into the mix, I can see where plenty can go wrong. To me, European charities tend to mean U.N. related work, which translates to corruption and waste.

As is everywhere, political pork is about buying political capital. The American constituent tends to care about jobs. So it makes sense to appeal to what we want. Europe being predominantly liberal, it makes sense to appeal to what the liberal voter base wants. Steering money towards the unproductive part of the economy just seems a dumb way to go about things.

I’m no expert on European nonprofits, so categorize this under Friday night random beer talk.

As a side note our company also gives much more to the Republican side of the fence, which is nice to see.

I wonder why

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It argues the European Union have been gravely damaged by three core problems – economically it is falling far behind the U.S. and Asia, politically it is deeply divided on issues like Iraq, the new EU constitution and the euro and its legitimacy has been shattered by a crippling ‘lack of popular understanding and enthusiasm’.

‘Europe’s share of the world economy is shrinking as the United States constantly outstrips European growth and the Asian economies surge ahead,’ it warned.

Idiots… when are the Eurocrats going to realize that you can’t tax and grow at the same time.

I’ll be happy to see the EU go.