The UN's functions

Seeing the article "U.N. is at a critical juncture as it struggles to assert its relevance" article once again I ponder the UN's function. I have long thought that it serves many vital functions in coordinating the world's interactions among its many nations in the complex swirling civilzation in progress. The WDG is an example of the great function type that the UN can do. The world environment's health and wellbeing seems to need to have an international body to provide primary monitoring and recommendations, since individual countries tend to be concerned with their own prosperity regardless on the effect of their input and output on the larger world environmental resource system, which is largely a "closed system" at present (and likely to remain so as long as we are limited to expensive and wasteful rocketry to make the first step up into high earth orbit, from where rocketry can travel with vastly greater efficiency - instead of even exploring kinetically supported structure bridge potentials for extremely low cost high capacity transportation to high earth orbit.)

The UN as a peacekeeping military function provider, seems quite advantageous to the United States, and ought to utilize it far more often, especially instead of launching into unilateral wars as has been happening in the past decade too much. Being an overwhelmingly powerful nation has the same drawbacks as an overwhelmingly powerful man - restraint and wisdom in the use of that power is hard to guarantee. So an overarching entity such as the UN can offer a wider viewpoint and administration of even military force. This can be welcome when insurgents attempt to take over a country, but I wonder what would happen if the United States found itself under military attack, would it heel to the authority of the UN, I wonder. At least one of the political parties would not cater to that moderation, most likely.

About the only complaint I have had in the past is when the UN apparently was trying to assert authority over what modes people can use to maintain their health as well as to recover from illness or injury of any kind - physical, mental, emotional, etc. Attempts to control what health supplements - such as vitamins and nutritional supplements - people can use to improve their wellbeing, just seems quite harmful to people in general.

Here in the US, similar efforts surface occasionally when big businesses seek to use legislation to block business competition in the health and wellbeing fields - such as by taking nutritional substances long in common use beneficially by people that are common foodstuffs, and attempting to require people go to an expensive doctor and get a prescription so as to be able to buy those foods anymore at much higher prices - simply because those foods have been found to help a person's health - and that is easily seen through (by lots of people including myself as a rule) as a business scam, although it is not always certain that government sees it that way, for unknown reasons. Public complaints over this tend to become shouting matches in the media.

This response is instead of efficacy testing, or far better, letting the customer find out what works. Many healing modes are individual-dependent, instead of a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. Over time, an individual finds out what has worked for oneself in OTC items and general foodstuffs. It can be helpful to have expert help and advise at time, too.