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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (9896)	11/12/2001 7:40:10 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Ish; Re: "Future wars may be fought over water. Only .5% of all the water on the Earth is accessible fresh water." When I was in high school, the intellectuals were convinced that by 1984 the world would be fighting over food. Here it is 2001, and the trade disagreements between the wealthier nations is over the refusal to allow the other nation to *sell* food. Wheat is at a price which, corrected for inflation, is a tiny fraction of its price 100 years ago. The same thing is going to happen with water. Humans are resourceful sons of bitches, and they will find ways to purify water, conserve it, and move it around from where there's too much of it to where there's not enough. All this talk about what future generations are going to suffer from is misguided because it fails to recognize that there are 5 billion intelligent people out there working on these (and other) problems. All it takes is one person to figure it out. In actual fact, the solutions are already known to millions, but are not yet implemented because water is still too cheap, other technology isn't ready yet, or there are political problems. These problems get solved. You might as well have said (back in 1880) that the world of the 21st century was obviously going to be one of darkness because there wasn't going to be enough whales to supply sufficient light. We've been through this before a thousand times. Ignore the silly people who say that we're going to run out of things. If anyone wants to help with the problem, they should get a job with a company working on the problem, not write about it and try to get the politicians involved in it. The worst thing that the writers and politicians ever did to this fair country is to demonize radioactivity to the point where no nuclear (electric) power plants have been started for 30 years. The result is that we are incredibly dependent on foreign oil, and as a result have to give a fig what the internal politics of wonderful places like Saudi Arabia are. If the dogooders and politicians had just left the whole thing alone the carbon dioxide problem would be less, our political problems would be reduced, and our economy would be stronger. Long term resource problems (like food, energy, housing, and water) will be *solved by people who are rewarded for solving them. This is as it has always been, it is as it will always be. The effect of writers, politicians, and the voting public is to screw things up. Writers, journalists and politicians are rewarded by making problems seem larger than they actually are.* Writers and journalists are rewarded for providing entertainment (which they call "news"), not solving problems. Politicians pick up votes by scaring people, not by solving problems. Mass media is not the solution, they are the cause of the problems. The whole beating of breasts over the alleged strength of the Taliban is just another example in the long long series of journalists making the world look like a more dangerous and difficult place than it actually is in order to entertain people. The world is dangerous enough as it is without these entertainers running around scaring people. -- Carl