"Our ‘D+’ grade on climate change can be improved..."

Absolutely! Let's rally round and see if we can get it up to an 'F'! Given that the avowed aim of UN 'climate change' policy is to bankrupt its richer members in order to benefit its poorer ones, the lower we manage to score, the better.

The UN has demonstrated its inability to deal with what is most important like hunger, disease, poor governance and conflicts like Rwanda, Syria, North Korea, Iran, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, etc.

Yet it gets involved in advocating and attempting to impose 'nanny state' policies and advocating ideological beliefs like Agenda21, climate change, Kyoto Protocol, renewable energy and carbon pricing on the countries that are doing the best job of managing the needs of their people and the environment. The UN is almost as bad as our ABC at advocating loony Left policies. If we cannot remove the ideological bias of the 'progressive' advocates from the UN and the ABC, we need to progressively withdraw funding from both and aim to privatise the ABC.

In response to the author's pathetic attempt at shaming Australia - "D" to "F" indeed! She should be ashamed of herself.

Yes its true the UN deserves an F on the most intractable international problems. The UN Resolution concerning Syria has done nothing to stop Syria's Civil War - although the UN Resolution has certainly given the Assad dictatorship increased legitimacy.

I thought the author was only asking for more money for the limo fleet of UN delegates* in New York.

* that is UN delegates from dirt poor Third World countries.

Full of failed, power hungry developing world politicians and others living off taxes from the West while dictating highly suspect environmental policies on Western countries in order to increase influence and extract carbon tax money (Yes,they get a share of our Carbon Tax!).

The UN is attempting to become a global power in its own right and recently failed in its attempt to take over the internet in order to centralise its control. This would have let it censor dissenting ideas particularly in regards to its environmental policies. Its also keen on a transaction tax on all financial transactions simply to fill its own coffers.

The UN has been particularly ineffective in dealing with response to famines which are in fact predictable as they are usually due to weather events and subsequent crop failure in the horn of Africa.

Remember, this is the organisation which allowed the Maurice Strong to rise to the top, dictate Climate policy and subsequently (allegedly) steal nearly 1 million dollars in the oil for food scandal and then flee to China to avoid conviction.

Why should these unelected and often dubious and shady individuals dictate our lives? and why should we support them?

That the U.N. has allowed Israel to occupy the Palestinians since 1948 shows to me its corruption and weakness and impotence.

The original intent of the U.N. was admirable, but nations like the bullying U.S. and its imperial Allies used their power to subvert and manipulate the U.N. They turned it into a joke!

It does do good work in some areas but when it comes to stopping the warmongers and imperialists it fails completely.

It needs to be reconstituted so that all nations can influence its workings, not just the psychotic war-lovers!

The UN is a corrupted institution like the World Bank and the US Federal Reserve. In the West,the private banking cartels own our Govts and we the debt serfs.

Sorry Liz, We don't see the UN from your elite position.

We see it from side on, & we see the most corrupt organisation on earth, worthy of nothing but total destruction.

The only use it has or can serve is as an example of what we must never do again.

Whatever faults aside, where would the world be without the UN?
Who would be trying to keep some resemblance of peace?

Perhaps elements of the UN have been corrupted. Have been.
Perhaps bad elements can be weeded out.

The UN is not entirely the culprit. For example the UN is not being informed of true information from Australia, not even the Australian people are.

Anyway, what is the alternative to try to sustain world food supply and maintain world peace?

The UN is the tool the Bankers are using to bring in their "New World Order" of a totalitarian one world Govt and our pollies have signed off on this via Agenda 21.

The UN is a criminal organisation and the sooner it dies the better. Australia should withdraw from the UN and so should the USA and UK.

Firstly it's an organisation of *States*, not "nations". See how the statists keep confusing the state with society, the elite sub-group monopolosing power with the broad mass of the people whom they subjugate and parasitise?

Secondly, notice how it's starting point and end point is always the State, rather than the real locus of human value, which is the individual, through which, and only through which all group action is possible?

Thirdly reason both the League of Nations and the UN came into existence was because of wars between *states* because of protective trade policies. Trying to make your state economically self-sufficient is a never-ending fad among leftists. Like all socialism, it would be better called anti-socialism. If you are a country - like, say Germany - and you're trying to be economically self-sufficient in a world of economically protectionists states, then the only way you can get things you can't produce yourself, is to physically take over countries that do.

Fourthly, it's not the UN that preventing wars and rumours of wars. It's the ability of the people of countries to trade freely with each other, unhindered by their governments.

Fifthly, in case you haven't noticed, all of the members of the UN pursue and agenda of unlimited government power. Just one program alone, Agenda 21, is just a re-run of all the failed nostrums of socialism in the 20th century.

Sixthly, the inflexible response of statists everywhere, when faced with the failure of statist interventions, is to assume the problem is not enough interventions, and to launch another coercive attack on society. The UN is a magnet for exactly the kinds of statists that caused all the problems of the 20th century that gave rise to the UN in the first place. It represents the dreadful idea that the people are just to be moulded, the dictates of government are omnipotent, and the legislators infallible.

Seventhly, notice how the statists never mention the aggressive violence that is the basis of the existence of all states, and which they think is the basis of the good society? For example, all over the world, *people* have always valued men more than women for some things, and women more than men for other things. Whether or not you agree with it, Elizabeth Shaw believes that people should be physically attacked to force them to obey her opinions about what people's values should be.

Elizabeth, at what stage, short of shooting people, do you renounce the use of aggressive violence to enforce the gender policies you advocate?

If the UN had full rein it would cause the deaths of thousands of millions of people with another re-run of the socialist policies it is itching to implement, and only prevented by people's non-compliance with its wishes.

JF Aus
It is simply idiotic to think that the UN is sustaining world food supply. That is being done by farmers - remember them: the productive class? - impeded, burdened and opposed in thousands of ways by the states ruling over them, aided and abetted by the UN and the plain nutty belief that the state is the fountain of all moral and economic good.

@ Jardiune K. Jardine.

Socialism must be alive and well in Australia because Australia is not coming forward with information a proper originally intended functional UN would require.
Australia could be in there correcting the bad situation that Jardine K and other on OLO are stating.

I am absolutely aware that information of substance about the real devastated state of ocean seafood supply is not reaching the UN and so without solutions it must be expected the UN cannot sustain world seafood supply.
Agriculture alone cannot sustain world food supply. Farmers need affordable fertilizer and feedmeal in order to make end product affordable to people in need. The ocean used to supply such requirement.

Farmers in Australia are doing it tough, especially because they are not being informed about the real future and therefore real value of their land and industry.
Property rights are even being impacted by green nonsense about farmers polluting the ocean, while sewage nutrient pollution is being spewed daily into ocean ecosystem waters, politically unnoticed especially by the ABC.
The ABC should be the media communicating problems in order to find relevant solutions.

Aus farmers also sometimes need subsidies in order to compete with subsidized food coming into Australia from overseas, plus there is subsidised overseas farmed produce filling overseas markets, in competition with Aust farmed supply.

If Australia is to work toward strengthening the UN then surely the truth about real food supply problems and impacts should be reported to the UN, especially by a food producing nation such as Australia.
But reaching even local MP’s or getting a truthful dialogue underway with government departments seems impossible.
A good example, the FIRB does not possess criteria to understand fish protein supply links to foreign buy up of the Aus export beef industry, dairy industry too. The FIRB is virtually letting it happen. So is our ABC, airwaves packed with CO2 nonsense instead.

Why just blame the UN?

At least the UN has some grasp of need to sustain, or did the Aust ABC come up with that focus?
At least the UN is trying.

JF Aus
You are displaying the complete misunderstanding which can be the only basis for supporting the UN.

"information a proper originally intended functional UN would require."

Just *think* for a sec. What information would that be? Give us the exhaustive list.

You don't realise what a clanger you're dropping in your suggestion that, if only coercive central planners had enough knowledge, they would be able to optimise the allocation of scarce resources to their most valued social ends. It is a statement in a nutshell of why socialism killed 100 million people where it was tried.

"Farmers ... are not being informed about the real future and therefore real value of their land and industry."

And the UN, of all things - an unrepresentative cartel of criminal protection rackets - is going to supply information about the "real value" of "land and industry"? You don't realise what a fool you're making of yourself.

Tell you what ... never mind the UN - why don't you tell us what is the "real value" of "land and industry"?

"The ABC should be the media communicating problems in order to find relevant solutions."

And surprise surprise, the ABC - a government broadcasting service - just happens to be failing to do what it should be. So that's your reason why governments should be given even more power?

"Aus farmers also sometimes need subsidies in order to compete with subsidized food coming into Australia from overseas..."
Why?

"A good example, the FIRB does not possess criteria to understand fish protein supply links to foreign buy up of the Aus export beef industry, dairy industry too."
So government needs to have an understanding of all chemical reactions in the world to carry out their mission of total control of everything?

You see there’s simple ignorance, compound ignorance, and culpable criminal ignorance. You and Elizabeth Shaw are displaying the third.

The fact you honestly believe in the UN is no excuse, because your belief system has already been demonstrated to be genocidal.

You cannot solve economic problems by economic illiteracy backed by lethal force.

Maurice Strong is a billionaire and ex-secretary of the UN. Maurice wants to see the world's population reduced by 90%,as with many of our other financial oligarchs.

Will our masters be first to volunteer to relieve this planet of excess humanity,the ones they refer to as "the useless eaters"?

Jardine K,

The UN should be aware southern hemisphere ocean food stocks are now seriously devastated and that when you join that situation with alrweady known devastation of northern hemisphere fish stocks it becomes a worldwide situation with unprecedented impacts and consequences that require solutions.

The UN is supposed to be about uniting nations but how is that possible with various nations becoming desperate. For example Somalia began their seafaring violence by trying to chase foreign fishing poachers away and then turned to piracy and lawlessness on land.
Food riots are occurring elsewhere and there is more to come.
Middle East people are hungry because available food costs too much. What do you pay [per kilo for fresh fish Jarsdine K? Yesterday I saw quality Aus rump steak at a butchers for $39 per one kg.

Yes, Aus farmers are not being informed of the shortfall in world protein due to devastation of world ocean seafood. Aus farmers should be increasing the national herd instead of selling out for a pittance.
This is the time Aus farmers should be gearing up to meet increased international demand for essential protein.
Are you Jardine K aware of that situation? Have you been informed about that situation by ABC news?

The whole world ocean is now nearly empty of seafood compared to what used to be there. Nat Geo report 90% of big fish already gone. What do you Jardine K think that situation does to the value of limited arable protein producing land?

The FIRB factor is that supply and demand influences should be known by Aus people in order to manage land value and industry assets. The FIRB told mne they possessed no criteria to understand ocean protein and beef supply and demand links. Close the fish shop and where Jardine K do you think consumers will go for alternative protein?

Continued next post or when quota permits…….

@ Jardine K. continued……….

Aus appears full of crooks like some people say the UN is.
Example, political planners seem to have taken my early 80’s warning of ocean fish devastation info to create aquaculture policy and other alternative white meat production for their cronies.
UN crooks, blimey, what about the crooks milking public money for CO2 nonsense, tax and energy inflation and all? WHAT IS THE ABC SAYING ABOUT THAT?
The ABC is even promoting emissions, crooks here right in front of you. Have you not seen the steam coming from the water cooling towers, while news film dialogue is about carbon emissions?

As for the planners, what a dangerous mess they are making. Right now there are 400,000 egg layers at one farm with bird flu, another one also nearby. Even feed for aquaculture is being imported while antibiotics drive away overcrowding disease.
Antibiotic resistance comes to mind, in cheap milk too re mastitis.
And more factory farming, small farmers forced out. We did it, do it, not the UN.

Genuine Aus farmers need subsidies sometimes so they can compete and remain viable and in business, instead of uprooting trees and ploughing crops or dumping unsold produce.
There are a billion and more underfed people that are potential customers but out politicians go to cricket, bike riding, swimming, budgie smuggling and posing for the media for self-interest political propaganda.
Which politician went to volunteer at a CWA or Salvation Army function?
No time to discuss real issues. Criminal negligence do you think?
Far right and far left policy is not good policy in my opinion.
Whatever happened to Malcolm Fraser and Ralph Hunt type of caring people? Labor had a few decent ones too.

I think the criminal ignorance involves those who know of collapsing world food sustainability but do not want it seen, keep the public and farmers ignorant instead, buy up what they can on the cheap.

I like to believe the UN system can be strengthened to be more like it was first intended to be.

JF Aus
We agree on pretty much your whole take on it except the idea that the UN - of all things - is any kind of hope of any kind of solution but even more corruption and waste.

What's causing the dearth of fish stocks is the tragedy of the commons.

At first, the whole world was unowned, and there was enough for everyone because the population was so small, and the untrammeled extent of the world so large. But as resources become scarce, the only rational way to rationalise them to their competing uses without resorting to aggressive violence, is by way of private property.

If private property in land had never developed, we would not now be able to support but a fraction of the population that is supported. And if we went from private land ownership back to common ownership, thousands of millions of people would die of starvation. That's why tens of millions died as soon as private ownership was abnegated under socialism in the 20th century. What is called "socialisation" is only trying to rationalise scarce resources by resorting to aggressive violence, that is all. In reality it's anti-social.

What is stopping the fish stocks from being conserved is the fact that they are held in commons; and what is stopping them from being appropriated into private property - the civilising process - is *States* - territorial monopolists of aggression, monopolising the ownership and preventing homesteading.

The problem you are considering is caused by too much socialisation of resources. The UN is exactly the wrong direction to be going in for a solution, which is, seasteading - private property in marine and oceanic fisheries in civil disobedience of the States causing the problem.

"Australia should work to strengthen UN".. Balderdash Crapola.
Australia should run as far away fro the United Nations as we can get.
Corruption, greed and more corruption they have it all.

Will our masters be first to volunteer to relieve this planet of excess humanity,the ones they refer to as "the useless eaters"
Arjay,
The useless eaters are programmed to committing slow suicide AFTER saturation breeding.
Watch TV on weekends & see them amusing themselves.

@ Jardine K. Jardine,

I too agree pretty much on your take but perhaps now add this to your thinking.

Evidence of substance indicates overfishing is not really the cause of world fish devastation.
Humans see fishing boats at work and stocks collapsing but what humans are not seeing is nutrient pollution feeding algae that is destroying seagrass food web nurseries that are supposed to supply bigger fish with food.
Most animals fail to reproduce if adequate food is not available.

A bottom line problem is human intent not to see need to act on marine animal starvation. There is failure to manage to ocean ecosystems.

By the way, I do not want to sound like I am anti ABC or anti media because I am not, I savvy there are a lot of good people in there, just like there are at the UN. But the selfish and self- interested seem to pull the strings.

I think many people understand the Aus ABC and other major media are spinning tales about CO2. Similar incomplete science claim with spin is happening with media blaming overfishing.
Of course fishing has impact but it is not the cause.
The cause in effect is ocean ecosystem management not being put in place.

If solutions to ocean ecosystem damage were underway, substantial new business and absolutely significant employment would be underway as well, with more to follow in order to sustain AFFORDABLE food and fertilizer supply on this rare planet.

Understanding of the over-all relevant situation/s, indicates just how much business and employment could occur.
Prosperity and peace that contented people enjoy would occur.
Peace between people and nations would more likely occur.

OK let’s say the UN is corrupted. But same would occur with any new world authority.
Cost of setting up a new authority would be massive.
I think it might be best to use law to rid the wrong at the UN and at home.

@ individual,

The “useless eaters” are consumers that the economy needs in order to function. They even consume entertainment on weekends.

Don't be so silly JF Aus.

Throughout history, once a people have succeeded in the struggle to feed themselves, & have food to spare, they immediately use it to go off & conquer someone else.

People are programed to fill their food store against lean times, & once their existing store is full, to go build a bigger one.

Hasbeen,
Throughout history both the land and the oceans have never been as empty of food for humans as they are right now.
Never has there been a human population of 7 billion to feed with essential protein, daily.

“Fill their food store” with what, at what cost?
Middle East people say strife there is really about being hungry with not enough money to buy food.

Previously through history free wildlife has been there for the taking, generally speaking not any more.

Hunger breeds irritability, argument, civil unrest. Fat cat’s don’t seem to know about that or have forgotten.
People are going to war ANYWAY to get what they need to survive, plus whatever else some can get - like control of a country.

So what do you suggest, Hasbeen?
Should we all just forget about what is happening and not try to get solutions happening, do nothing?

"OK let’s say the UN is corrupted. But same would occur with any new world authority.
Cost of setting up a new authority would be massive."

You seem to be assuming that the solution is a "world authority", or other political means.

But of course the UN was never set up to manage fish stocks in the first place, was it?

My point is that there is intrinsically nothing about the UN that makes it suitable for the purpose. If I were to suggest that we should get the local soccer club, or the bridge club, or a bikie gang, to manage the world's fish stocks, you would immediately recognise that that particular collectivity is not fit for the purpose.

But mention government - or in this case a collectivity of governments - and all of a sudden we enter this logic-free zone where people project onto it anything they wish, even if
a) governments are causing the problem in the first place
b) there is intrinsically nothing about government that makes it suitable for the purpose
c) any governmental approach sets up intractable vested interests, and causes unintended consequences and social problems that are very difficult to solve.

It is not okay to assume that governments can allocate scarce resources to their most valued ends, which is the essential economic fallacy you assume. Governments do not have the knowledge, the capacity, or the selflessness to do it.

While ever fisheries remain common property, we will reap the tragedy of the commons from the continuance of fish socialism. The question is how to end it.

Elizabeth
At what stage, short of shooting people, do you renounce the use of aggressive violence to enforce the gender policies you advocate?

@ Jardine K. Jardine,
Solutions to world seafood devastation have to involve a world authority because oceans/ocean of the world are a world responsibility.

The UN is supposed to manage world food supply, via the FAO. Supply is linked for example to essential fishmeal and fertilizer, fish oil, guano.
I am, not talking about managing fish stocks, the key requirement if to manage ocean food web ecosystems that government fisheries agencies and the UN do not presently manage.
Australia could come forward with a proposal for such management and that would strengthen UN policy and achievements.

The UN is obviously not a local club, it is though obviously an international organization, and one that is already set up, and it already has a storehouse of relevant data/evidence not being yet put to use.

The cause of the problem could be said to be bigotry, ego, greed, stupidy, or fact it’s only 2013 and not 2050. Why blame government when it is media that is failing to communicate the ongoing series of incidents that indicate devastated fish stocks. The www is even being edited of evidence, such as news reports that led up to the point where “colin the whale” being put down. A few Youtube records remain. And the true likely situation remains hidden, that the abandoned nuzzling humpback whale calf was seeking to be fed and was not in a panic situation stranded on a beach.

Continued next post……..

Cont’d…….
Then there was October mass starvation of mutton birds along coast from Rockhampton Qld to South Australia and around Tasmania, starvation being the cause, wildlife experts in 4 states shocked by severity of mortality, all not reported by the ABC or major media except Channel 10.

Governments could work with the UN and the UN could work more closely with governments in order to specifically deal with the now existing worldwide collapse of sustainable world ocean seafood supply.
It’s not about extinction, it’s about availability and affordability of essential protein.
Continuing failure to want to see the fundamental problem is amounting to intractable criminal negligence to assist humanity and the environment.

I assume no economic fallacy. Of course local governments can not afford to manage the entire oceans.
Action is required by world authority and that action would best involve stimulating UN and national budgets. It can be done.
There is need to comprehend the enormity of the problem and seriousness of impact and consequences involved, then such international economic stimulation can be understood.

Look, I came forward in 1982 and warned of world ocean fish depletion and some people laughed, but they don’t now, just ask actor Jack Thompson.
By all means chuckle about the economic stimulus but remember I am too proud to get egg on my face with stupid nonsense statements.

Good productive socio-economic solutions can end the presently downhill ongoing mess including consequences that are compounding

Well everything is a thing "of the world", so according to your theory, everything is the responsibility of the UN: food, water, clothing, transport, communications, entertainment. All the lipstick in the world is "the world's" supply of lipstick, so therefore the UN is responsible for the supply of lipstick.

It's a ridiculous argument.

Notice by the way, that you are unable to specify what knowledge would be needed, and what would need to be done. All we get is open-ended appeals to magic: oops "economic stimulus", as if economic production were a genie and only government could rub the lamp.

But thanks for demonstrating the complete nonsense that underlies the assumptions in the UN's favour.

"There is need to comprehend the enormity of the problem ..."

What makes you think your comprehension is equal to the task, when, if it were right, full socialism would be a more productive system? It's moral and economic gibberish.

Elizabeth
At what stage, short of shooting people, do you renounce the use of aggressive violence to enforce the gender policies you advocate?

@ Jardine K.Jardine,

I agree with you there Jardine K, your lipstick etc argument is ridiculous.

It is amazing some people are so anti UN with unsubstantiated claims of 'corruption'.

No alternative for the future eh. Just useless go nowhere waste of time criticism.

Truly amazing.