In article ,
Ross McKay wrote:
On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:24:48 -0700, Billy wrote:
Good read Ross. Thank you. There must be a series of dams to store the
rains, so that a farmer can tell whether it is a good year for annuals
or not.
There is a complex arrangement of water catchment authorities that
monitor rainfall, plus local and state authorities that monitor river
flows. The information they gather helps formulate whether the already-
sold water allocations can actually be "delivered" to the irrigators.
Overselling allocations (especially to tax-avoidance-based MIS
plantations) has meant that irrigators who did the "right thing" and put
off drawing on their allocations until later in the season actually got
no water, and thus had paid for an abundance of nothing.
The current fiasco^H^H^H^H^H^H government effort is an attempt to
establish water allocations based more on actually how much water is
likely to flow, and allowing for some to come out at the ends of the
system too.
Front page of the local paper heralds the planets human population as
reaching the 7 billion level. There is certain to be tension between
resources and needs.
To me it just seems so bloody damn stupid that we have supported these
profane wars, which cause people to hate us, when a fraction of the
money would have given clean water and sanitation to the worlds
underprivileged (previously colonized), and they would have loved us.
But the OECD world needs to secure the oil and the gas pipelines! I
mean, bring peace and democracy to the middle east and expunge terrorism
from the planet!
Sadly, there seems to be a connection between the oil and gas pipelines,
and peace and democracy. None of the countries involved drew their own
borders (with the exception of Iran) which was done primarily by the
British, and to a lesser extent, the French, with an eye towards keeping
the new states unstable. At the request of Britain, the US overthrew the
democratcally elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. We
really haven't been modeling the appropriate behavior for the Middle
East.
Then we have
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5077984.stm
US 'biggest global peace threat'
----
Closely followed by Israel, and sadly, I find myself in agreement.
http://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=50080
http://www.time.com/time/europe/gdml/peace2003.html
To leave peace to market forces (which congers up neo-liberalism and
free markets) is insufficient. Either everyone gets a seat at the table,
or it is everyone for themselves, which I believe has got us to the
impasse that we face today in the Middle East.
Our agriculture is based on fossil fuel, which has peaked and the cost
of pesticides and fertilizer will rise. By 2050 topsoil will be a
memory, all the fossil water from aquifers will be gone, the oceans will
be fished out, and we will have hungry people in failed nuclear states.
Best thing we could do right now, would be to call off the wars, give
everyone seeds to plant, and offer every man $1000 (or more), if they
get a vasectomy.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/m...515308172.html