It is an interesting read. I had kind of hoped back when I was a boy reading Analog in the 7th grade that we would have had a moon base roughly 30 years ago. It got pissed away by the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, etc. I doubt I'll see it but it would have been nice.
There were some 448 comments on the article at the time I wrote this and I did not trouble to read through them although the first few seemed on point. I just wondered to myself as they talked about interlocking totally single mission point failures (they never used that word, the authors expect everything to be as thoroughly proven and every bit as reliable as Apollo or the Space Shuttle) if they have read The Martian and have considered packing away a decent amount of fertilizer and some potatoes in each payload, just in case.
Once there was an author called Sam Nicholson who wrote some stories many disliked but which I enjoyed. She postulated a mandatory UN presence on the Moon devoted to 'sharing the resources' and since she wrote long ago she was unkind enough to make sure her UN negotiator was drawn from real life and would naturally expect room in the nascent colony for his cow barns, sacrificial fowls and harem.
I wonder, why does the UN leave such a bad taste in literally everybody's mouth? I don't recall reading a single speculative or any book of fiction that gives the UN credit for anything but turmoil, vice, ruin, war, poverty, disease, and corruption all the way down to the bottom.
7 comments:
They get depicted that way, because they are a kleptocracy. I realize that your question was rhetorical.
Lunar Direct seems the way to go.
It is the Noble service. As with EU diplomats they get their gigantic salary and it is tax free because .....betterment of mankind. If they did their business, whatever it is, on a raft adrift in a sea surrounded by sharks, I might buy into tax free but they don't have any business and they do no work and they aren't eaten by sharks. dammit!
Ummm. The UN leaves a bad aftertaste in the mouth of those who have sipped the UN flavored Kool Aide because I believe it is a reality in life that the UN is not and never will be apolitical and without personal interest on the part of the UN employees. Just like any other large ungainly government organ. the UN is an organ that dreams a theory of something and then divines the evidence to support the theory; like global warming or peace is in our grasp but we need just a little bit more money, or hungry people are permanently satisfied with what they were once freely given.
The UN largely functions like a large toothless quadriplegic lion on its deathbed demanding to be listened to by deaf dead people.
Exactly and as a consequence nobody in the world pays any attention to it. Whatever cachet it had expired early in the Cold War when the nuclear club would veto any possibility of UN intervention. I remember reading long ago some German statesman making a statement about how utterly obnoxious the French are and so we will be compelled to attack them. These are the countries running the show now in western Europe and they no longer have any adult supervision because we don't play that game anymore.
I only say those things as they reflect the two UN missions I was seconded too in the 1970s and a lifetime of living life with my eyes and ears open to take in what is happening around me. those "experiences" were a true education into the functioning of a bureaucracy as if it were a man running wildly down a corridor lined with knife blades and rabid dogs while blindfolded with his hands cuffed behind and raw steaks wrapped around his groin. One does ones duties as ordered, no matter how bitter the kool-aide.
as to the French being obnoxious enough to compel an attack, I believe it is a trait of the French to be arrogant when dealing with their betters; because they recognize none as better.
The end for them is near, and the funny/sad thing is they have brought their killers into La Belle France themselves. French culture will be going up in flames as the recent immigrants refuse any effort to assimilate them into French culture. with Notre Dame, how many churches in France have gone to ashes now? If they follow form, the muslim population in Paris will want to build a mosque on the site of the remains. Museums may be next? The French education system is the root of their problems. They have allowed those who cannot and never have done, to teach those who next must do, how to succeed. Perhaps the Next Republic will do a bit better. Perhaps not.
But, imagine the UN run by the French.
Yep. My UN support was pretty much confined to sanctions/no fly zone and support of Scott Ritter's bunch of helpless losers and their hunt for WMD places of business in Iraq following the first of our wars with Iraq. About the only thing I did directly for them was declare a couple of mine danger areas known to be cleared, cleared. I couldn't do that for the MDAs inside the 10 fathom line since only the JMSDF divers tried it that shallow. However, the stench of the UN was everywhere in that AOR.
The UN is run by the French. Hatred for all things English / American tops the list.
I watched the mono-culture of France/French die in my visits there. They are now a semi-islamic state. As you say, in about 40 years they will be an islamic state. They know it now but are powerless to object because they allowed their government to disarm them. They really need to start killing off their governing class as rapidly and messily as possible.
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