[water] and the middle-east

Putting aside military action, oil and gas for now, a good indicator of whether there is any form of cooperation in the middle-east can be seen through water.

Israel's main water supplies come from:

Long-term Potential of Renewable Water

Resource

Replenishable Quantities

(MCM/year)
The Coastal Aquifer	320
The Mountain Aquifer	370
Lake Kinneret	700
Additional Regional Resources	410
Total Average	1,800

A look at the mountain aquifers and Lake Kinneret [follow links] show that these are not without their problems and the coastal aquifer is similarly environmentally and politically fraught. Also Israeli and Syrian intransigence towards one another has to be counterbalanced against pure need in the region.

Non-conventional Water Resources and Conservation After drawing on nearly all of its readily available water resources and promoting vigorous conservation programs, Israel has long made it a national mission to stretch existing sources by developing non-conventional water sources, while promoting conservation.

These efforts have focused on the following: reclaimed wastewater effluents; intercepted runoff and artificial recharge; artificially-induced rainfall - cloud seeding; and desalination.

Naturally, that is not sufficient and so Israeli long term strategy includes:

# The construction of desalination plants with an installed annual capacity of 400 MCM for seawater and with an annual 50 MCM capacity for brackish water.
# The rehabilitation of polluted and depleted wells with an annual total yield of up to 50 MCM.
# The importation from Turkey of an annual quantity of 50 MCM fresh water.
# To increase the amounts of treated sewage effluents suitable for for irrigation up to 500 MCM.

Turkey-Israeli trade is an indicative factor which adds to the mix:

Turkey and Israel are trade partners thanks to the geographical proximity, the good ties and the friendship, in 2007 Turkey [becoming] Israel's 8th largest trade partner ... based on a Free Trade Area agreement signed in 1997 [allowing] free circulation of trade between the two countries.

[By] 2007 the volume of the bilateral trade had reached a new record of almost three billions US dollars and in the first nine months of 2008 [it had] increased [by] more than 30% ... compared to 2007. The Israeli and Turkish navies have conducted joint exercises, there is a plan to build a massive pipeline from Turkey to supply water, electricity, gas and oil to Israel.

Egypt has a domestic need to publicly growl at Israel and to facilitate weapons through Gaza and yet they have common interests in some ways and are "not opposed" to a joint water project:

Several countries have contributed $15 million for the multipurpose Red-Dead canal project's feasibility study and environmental assessment. French company Coyne et Bellier is currently carrying out the feasibility study for the project, while the British firm Environmental Resources Management is undertaking the environmental assessment.

Meanwhile, Israeli Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, who headed his country's delegation to the water conference, said the "Peace Canal" project could benefit the entire Middle East.

He noted that Jordan's share of desalinated water under the project will be 65 per cent while 35 per cent will go to Israel and the West Bank. The project is expected to provide Jordan with 500 million cubic metres (mcm) of water annually.

The Red-Dead canal project is part of international efforts to save the Dead Sea, which has been shrinking at the rate of one metre per year, largely due to the diversion of water from the Jordan River for agricultural and industrial use.

Ditto with gas:

The protocol signed between Egypt and Israel in 2005 under which Israel imports Egyptian natural gas at a fraction of the cost on international markets provoked reactions that went beyond words. The opposition appealed to the courts and earlier this month the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the pumping of gas to Israel be stopped.

The government has not only refused to implement the decision but in doing so acted so hastily that it effectively undermined its own position in ongoing negotiations with Israel to secure a fairer price.Looking at it dispassionately, there is a joint problem here of expertise and the ready cash.

A 1997 article said:

For the most part, Egypt's desert reclamation attempts have been environmental and technical failures. Typically these Nile diversion projects are very expensive and the economic returns are minimal. Moreover, investments currently spent on desert reclamation could be put to better use in the fertile delta area.

Sorely needed are drainage systems to save the lands that are currently being lost to salinization and to the rise of the underground water table (a side effect of the High Aswan Dam).

While there is an obvious need for water-sharing arrangements, Israel remains a large per capita consumer, due to the lifestyle expectations of its westernized citizens. An anti-Israeli article says:

In spite of the positive publicity that Israel has received for its water sharing agreements with Jordan and with the Palestinians, Israel's share of area waters as a result of their agreements with the Arabs will be reduced marginally if at all, while the Arabs' share will be increased by only a relatively tiny amount.

American money is also a factor with the big players and can't be sneezed at.

Both biblically and strategically, the Tigris and Euphrates loom as a major factor, certainly for Iran's plans for expansion and a reliving of their ancient glory:

Turkey constructed the first major dam of the basin, commissioning the Keban Dam in 1973, with Syria soon following suit with the Tabqa Dam in 1975. The filling of these dams caused a sharp decrease in downstream flow, causing Iraq and Syria to exchange mutually hostile accusations and come dangerously close to a military confrontation.

The implications of the Turkish GAP projects are clear:

Given their position on the two rivers upstream from Syria and Iraq, the GAP projects, in particular, the Ilisu dam, have provoked concern in Damascus and Baghdad that the project, when completed, will substantially reduce the rivers’ total volume of downstream flow.

According to an official in Iraq's Water Resources Ministry, when Ilisu is completed in 2011, it will reduce the Tigris River waters by 47 per cent a year, depriving Mosul of about 50 percent of its summer water requirements (Al-Sabah, July 3).

Iraq annually requires about 50 billion cubic meters of water, with the Tigris providing 60 percent and the Euphrates the remaining 40 percent.

With Turkey angling for EU membership and major powers taking an interest in this, the American and European factors in the region cannot be ignored.

The simple fact is that the major local players in the region have to confront realpolitik, that sustenance and prosperity for each party depends on at least minimal levels of trade agreement and this forever undermines religious tensions at street and holy house level.

The world from the Minister of Trade's office where I put in a few hours each week for a few years was a different world to that perceived on the street. There is a level of realism at the sub-elite level which contrasts with the ideological madness at the elite level [the backers of governments and the king-makers] and the common factor is bilateral trade.

Put simply, there must be trade and on the question of essential resources, e.g. water, if there is much politicking then there is little ideology present at negotiations. It is out and out need. I put the opinion to the Minister last year that if the world could be governed by trade considerations, it would go a long way to normalizing relations.

He smiled a smile which spoke volumes - that it would be very nice, yes but that other parties considered there were higher political considerations.

As population increases, mismanagement continues and the west is present on the ground in the middle-east, water will increasingly become the catalyst for a real deterioration, a real slide in relations:

Facing historical, psychological and political barriers that have impeded cooperation and deadlocked diplomacy, nations in the region are sliding toward conflict over water. Water’s growing role in the emerging hydropolitics of the region has stressed the need for a new approach to safeguard this diminishing resource.

And into the whole cocktail can be mixed the religious factor:

Religious disagreements inside Jerusalem can get ugly, and invariably reverberate around the monotheistic world. Ultra-orthodox Jews have spat on Christian pilgrims visiting the stations of the cross on the Via Dolorosa, and Muslim clerics have screamed vitriolic threats at Uri Ariel, a Knesset member intent on testing Islamic tolerance by announcing plans to re-erect a synagogue beside the 7th-century silver-domed al-Aqsa mosque. Provocatively, he affirmed his commitment by pacing out the construction site with a posse of armed guards.

What to do? What can anyone do. Pray for eventual peace? Implement more efficient irrigation and water-supply techniques using shared technology in a stabilized middle-east with nutter groups like Hamas marginalized and where realpolitik reigns?

[silent saturday] long time, no rock

[15 000 words] time well spent

You've seen it at DK's, you might even have wandered over to Unity's. It's 15 000 words, which dwarfs anything I've written. In these "eight line bite posts" days which the short-attention spanners seem to demand, Unity's piece still deserves to be read in its entirety.

UPDATE: Sackerson begs to differ and his view is over here.

UPDATE UPDATE: Having read the article fully again, what Unity is basically arguing is:

1. The government has made a mess of legislation regarding the "drug war";
2. The scientific articles on risk and harm are inconclusive on newer drugs;
3. Prohibition has not significantly altered the level of drug usage.

All of these I'd agree with but there are two things Unity did which were disappointing:

1. He presented counter-argument as strawmen, inserting emotive phrases instead of examining the arguments against and presenting them impartially, something he does not do with those who wish to legalize hard drugs;

2. He fails to address the overall societal cost, not monetarily or on registered addicts but in terms of the culture of drugs and that is far less able to be pinned down, far less able to be quantified. He also doesn't address the political value of this culture becoming all-pervasive.

I stop short of saying he's wrong but it is going to require the level of research I just can't put in at this moment but should be able to two weeks from now.

[redundancy law] when are you eligible

Charon's podcast.

[civilians] when are they considered combatants

Before getting into the main question, the attack from the Lebanon raised a question:

So, if Nasrallah did not fire the rockets, who did?

Some Arabs claim that Israel fabricated the attack to justify striking against Hezbollah. That is difficult to believe, since the IDF already has too much on its hands and cannot fight on two fronts - despite assurances from Israeli officials that they can simultaneously battle Hamas and Hezbollah.

A more reasonable argument is that Saudi Arabia doctored the attack, through its own proxies in South Lebanon, to incriminate Hezbollah and provoke Israel into striking at the Islamic group. Saudi Arabia, after all, was not pleased with the results of the Lebanon war of 2006, since it failed to break - or even weaken - Hezbollah, which it sees as an extension of Iranian influence in the Arab world.

Coinciding with the latest tension in Lebanon was the emergence of a rival group to Hezbollah on January 7 called the Arab Islamic Resistance - believed to be linked to Saudi Arabia.

"When is a civilian a civilian and when is he a combatant?" An article on the Iraq war dead says:

And there is a more fundamental problem: hospitals had no formal category for "civilian combatants," although some doctors did note militia membership when this was obvious. The principal distinction they drew was between civilians and military personnel -- and this is not synonymous with the distinction between noncombatants and combatants.

Civilian combatants is a tricky category. Would you consider Dad's Army as civilian? If you were being invaded and were neither official military nor militia, would you still not have taken up a cudgel against a German unit if it came to it? Would you not give aid and succour to your nation's troops and aid them in whichever way you could? Would you not sit at a desk at Bletchley and try to decode enemy messages? Is not all of this destructive to the enemy?

What is a civilian in war time?

Hamas plays this game to the nth degree [see youtube above]. The ringleaders say that the civilians are lovingly surrounding the glorious hamas heroes and willingly laying down their lives. Oh really? Hamas have this thing about death is glorious and every Palestinian laying down his grandparents' and children's lives for the cause [see video] but the question still remains, from the point of view of Israel:

"When is a civilian a civilian and when is he a combatant?"

This is the thing it is so difficult to forgive with Hamas - that they will lodge weaponry and military supplies in the centre of supposedly civilian populations to increase the civilian dead and even fire at Israel from in there:

The Hamas tactic of firing rockets from schools, hospitals and mosques dates back to 2005, when Israel ended its occupation of Gaza. Several months ago, the head of the Israeli air force showed me a videotape (now available on YouTube) of a Hamas terrorist deliberately moving his rocket launcher to the front of a U.N. school, firing a rocket and then running away, no doubt hoping that Israel would then respond by attacking the rocket launcher and thus killing Palestinian children in the school.

And what of the "civilians" who suddenly man a rocket launcher, then just as suddenly go back to being shoemakers and housewives the moment the rockets are launched?

Hamas leaders have echoed the mantra of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, that "we are going to win because they love life and we love death."

This is why the bloggers who are waxing lyrical about the wicked Israeli targetting of civilians have their facts skewed.

What absolute bollocks.

It is significant that the individuals and groups saying Israel are "targetting" civilians are largely non-middle-eastern and/or leftist. People on the ground there know full well that Israel is solely targetting anything remotely Hamas:

Major Avital Liebowitz, of the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, told the correspondent that the army had indeed widened its target list in comparison to previous operations, saying Hamas has used ostensibly civilian actions as a cover for military activities. "Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target," she said.

Israel let it be known that they were doing this. Now what did Hamas do? Move all civilians to safe ground which civilized nations do? Not a bit of it. They arrange the maximum possible head count for their own people. And why are Hezbollah not attacking in the north? Why are Egypt and Syria not wading in? Why is Iran not sending troops?

So to quote the civilian casualties of Israel's actions - yes and the blame is laid fairly and squarely at the feet of the people represented in the youtube video which opened this post.

Thank goodness rational bloggers with no axe to grind recognize this:

I posted earlier this week about the double standards on display, but the more ludicrous articles I see from apologists for this violent anti-Semitism, especially the truly disturbing ones that try to make some (sometimes thinly veiled) comparisons with the Holocaust, the more I draw the conclusion that many of these apologists as little more than modern day “noble savages” (though what’s noble about violent ant-Semitism is beyond me).

Stop the rockets. Stop the violence. That's it.

UPDATE: For a more detailed look, try this and this.

[personal values] the system of things

[questions] you might not have considered

1. How do mermaids procreate?

2. Why do people keep returning to the fridge, hoping something new will be there to eat?

3. Where do lost tennis balls really go?

4. Why is the alphabet in that order?

5. How do you connect all nine dots in a square grid, using four straight lines only and never taking the pencil off the paper until it's done?

[long termism] the incentives need to be attractive

Long-term planning takes courage and lays potential burdens on posterity, whilst providing them with benefits which must be paid for now. In other words, your balance sheet in this and the next quarter are not going to show any tangible result for the investment, under current accounting methods.

Business think tanks have been urging long termism for a long time, e.g.:

1. Pension fund trustees should develop internal governance practices consistent with a long-term investment outlook. 2. The transition from antagonism to engagement of certain long-term investors-especially regarding long-term strategic discussions-should be fully explored.

Taking British industry as an example, Roderick Moore says:

Will Hutton is absolutely right when he says that we would all benefit if British companies invested more in research, development and training, and formed long-term relationships with their workers, bankers, suppliers and customers. However, I would like all this to be achieved by voluntary agreements between the people involved, because they perceive that it is in their best interests, rather than being forcibly imposed by the state, as stakeholding theorists believe it should be. This will only happen if taxation and company law are reformed so that companies are freed from the pressures which are driving them into short-termism.

Ditto in the U.S. Lawrence E. Mitchell, writing today in Business Week, takes the long view and diagnoses a problem at the heart of the American business system:

“The real culprit is the growing preeminence of finance over operations. It causes stock market considerations to trump those that improve the actual workings of a business. And the quicker the stock payoff can be engineered, the better. Until that changes, don’t expect CEOs to stop gaming the system.”

So that's a known known, still relevant in the current crissis, as is political short-termism, which is far more insidious for the planned economy. Andrew Leigh and Glenn Withers say:

Four attitudinal conditions are identified as restricting implementation of good policy in Australia. These are: short-termism, divided responsibility, risk aversion and lack of trust [in politicians and institutions].

Commonwealth Bank Chair John Ralph said at the 2004 AGM that “In today’s climate it takes a brave CEO to promote a long-term risk R&D project that will reduce current earnings and deliver the benefits well past his or her tenure.”

Today it would be seen as lunacy. Here are some other areas which need to be addressed:

The press exacerbates the problem. Leigh and Withers:

The media as an institution also has a role to play here. Regrettably Australia has amongst the most concentrated newspaper ownership, most advertising dependent television and most parsimoniously funded public broadcasting amongst the OECD countries.

Social safety nets are a huge drain:

Social safety nets are in place as they were not in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, but there is fear that these may be wound back severely as pressure on government budgets increases, including through demographic ageing [and] growing numbers on disability support and single parent payments.

The failure of the two party Westminster system of government:

The political wisdom has been that oppositions should present “small targets”, offering not bold visions of the future, but small increments on the status quo.

The Westminster system, with its loyalty-based preselection sidelining of talent, the adversarial, grand-standing political debate from entrenched positions and that "small target" presentation, is inimical to brainstorming and sound long term strategy.

Evidence based policy testing never shows its face:

[Governments don't] work to improve the evidence base from which we build our economic and social policies. Cost-benefit analysis for all large public investment projects should be obligatory and made publicly available. Similarly, randomised policy trials.

It's all very well for Jamie Saunders, of Bradford City Council to state:

Successful councils ensure that the voices of all get heard – not just the most vociferous, powerful or well-established… it means safeguarding the interests of future members of the community. Many decisions made now will have long term implications. These need to be identified, understood and designed into local policies.

.. but as more and more people are realizing, the new hierarchy of available money dictates the pecking order and today it runs like this:

1. EU loans and grants rule, especially outside London and the regions, e.g. Yorkshire Forward, allow only people to have a voice who are onside with the Common Purpose mindset, i.e. the EU rules;

2. The only long-termism is stemming from EU policy and it's not a long-termism which is healthy for "Britain as Britain" or for its new serf class.

Steps

Seems to me that there are a few immediate changes required:

1. Kill off Lisbon in Ireland and start the road back to regaining control of Britain by British money reinvesting in infrastructure, production and R&D, despite the allure of EU money;

2. Cross-party agreement to make mandatory a percentage of annual revenue for long-term infrastructure based on all interested party recommendations;

3. End to confrontational Westminster politics, retention of premier minister and council of ministers, cross party;

4. Elimination of stealth taxes, VAT, capital gains tax and implementation of flat tax rates with reductions to reward incentive on start-ups involved in national manufacturing.

That's a start.

Now of course you're going to say that they'll never get their snouts out of the trough [N3 here] so what incentives could you offer the two party system to end itself? The only way I see is for an external threat to galvanize the parliament into an enforced working arrangement, with personal financial incentives in the medium term to create a vote in parliament which would allow this to happen.

Only then could there be, not so much a covering of butts but a joint attempt to find solutions.

[never changes] the impossible dream

Vox:

Considering that it was some 89 years ago that Ludwig von Mises first demonstrated the Impossibility of Socialist Calculation, it's stunning to observe that Americans are collectively dumb enough to intentionally repeat one of Mankind's greatest economic blunders.

[eyewatch 1227] how stupid are people these days

In Private Eye this fortnight, apart from the Jamaicans stealing beaches for the construction industry [p16], the one which grabbed my attention was about David Lammy MP, on Celebrity Mastermind [p9].

Asked, "What was the married name of Marie and Pierre, winners of the 1903 Nobel prize for the discovery of radiation?" Lammy answered, er, "Antoinette," and went on to say that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII, Leicester is a famous English blue cheese and replied with other gems. However, he did know about Opray Winfrey and William Hague's 13 pints of beer.

There is great danger in lambasting the Dumb - just because half the population is dumber than you, half of it might be brighter than you too. Bill Bryson recognized this principle in his Notes from a Big Country and yet ... and yet ...

There really does seem to be an awful lot of ignorance about these days and inevitably it must come down to, not only what is being taught in schools but the whole curriculum and methodology, combined with the breakdown of society. Easy to use the old "in my day" preface to any remark but you know, it's true.

My occasional quizzes here were not what I should have thought fiendishly difficult although I'm sure you could have constructed one on feminism, reality TV and the Beckams which I would have failed miserably. All of which brings us to the question of which knowledge we value.

Surely there is a base level of memorable facts and figures which one would expect the average bear to have a working knowledge of and if not, why not? Try these five and see how you go:

1. Name any three of the seven ancient wonders of the world;
2. Which substances are represented by NaCl and H2CO4?
3. Name any revered American baseball babe and a perfect 10 from the Montreal Olympics;
4. How many are a baker's dozen, a score and a gross respectively?
5. What is the difference between "respectively" and respectfully"?

It's not the intention of this blog to put anyone down because you could hit back with myriad things I don't know and yet the general ignorance about in this day and age seems a little more than the imaginings of a jaded ex-academic and way above any statistically acceptable level.

By the way, is "myriad" used in singular or plural and what number does it originally refer to?