Bureaucratic Bloat
I get Dr. William Douglass' excellent health letter Second Opinion (Box 467939, Atlanta, GA 31146-7939, $49). He recently noted that the World Health Organization (WHO) has a billion-dollar-per-year budget. But almost two-thirds of that budget is spent on salaries, rent and supplies in just one city: Geneva, Switzerland. Most of the rest of its budget goes to support a high lifestyle for the apparatchiks playing big shot, riding around in their Land Rovers among the peasants. In other words, almost none of WHO's budget has anything to do with Z__ world health. This terminally corrupt agency is just typical of the whole U.N., a bureaucracy populated exclusively by nincompoops, socialists, elitists, empty suits and bad apples-and funded mostly by your tax dollars. The U.N. should be abolished. And WHO should be first on the hit list.
P.S. I was just reading the annual report of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), run by friends Hunter and Amory Lovins. Some have the very mistaken opinion that they're leftist refugees from the 60s; they're not, but that's another topic. What's interesting is what they call "RMI's Guiding Parable," in which WHO figures prominently. I'll reproduce it here, because it says a lot. "In the early 1950s, the Dayak people in Borneo suffered from malaria. The World Health Organization had a solution: they sprayed huge amounts of DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died; the malaria declined-so far, so good. But there were side effects. Among the first was that the roofs of the people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It seemed that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that had previously controlled the thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse, the DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of sylvatic plague and typhus. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, WHO was obliged to parachute 14,000 live cats into Borneo.
The true story of operation cat drop - now conveniently forgotten at WHO - illustrates that if you don't understand how things are interconnected, then often the cause of problems is solutions."
Which, once again, makes it clear that WHO is a "solution" that is itself in need of a solution - I would say a final solution.