Israel gets most of its water from Syria, which seems to me like a recipe for disaster. I believe Syria has some new, controversial water management policies that include diverting water back onto their own farmlands. Israel used to have - and probably still do - desalinization plants, but they had nowhere near enough capacity for the population. You can live without a phone, or even without electricity if need be, but without water you’ll last less than a week. War, when you get right down to, is usually about natural resources.

“Control your resources, and you control your world.”
– Gil Scott-Heron, B Movie
found in The Best of Gil Scott-Heron

In a way, hydroelectric dams are all about withholding water from the folks who live downstream. The Nile River used to overflow its banks every year, depositing silt on farmlands, thus making them fertile. The Aswan Dam prevents this flooding from happening, and everyone acts as if this is a good thing. The result is that farmers now must buy expensive commercial fertilizers. There is increasing desertification to the West, but I’m not clear whether that is due to human interference or to global warming.

On behalf of almost 60 million Americans, I’d like to apologize to the Canadians - and everyone else - for the mess we are making of the world.

Sorry Everybody.

I’m quoting Tony Clark’s chapter titled Turning On The Tap? Water Exports to the United States. (Anderson was Canada’s Minister of Environment)

“Anderson’s comment reflected what seems to be a general public consensus that water should not be treated like other natureal resources (for example oil, gas, minerals, timber) as a commodity to be bought and sold on the market”

Rule by Secrecy
by Jim Marrs
“He sits down to breakfast at 8 o’clock and leaves the table at 8:30, and in that short half hour his wealth has grown $1,041.50.”

The Will to Power
by Friedrich Nietsche
“Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone suffers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter.”

The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“As if conscious of his subordinate and dependent position, of not being their equal, he did not greet the visitors.”

What on Earth is God Doing?
by Renald E. Showers
“Theological and denominational differences were considered insignificant.”

The Unemotional Investor
by Robert Sheard
“Believe me, sometimes its more helpful when a test completely bombs.”

The Adapter, from A Record of Insanity, Journal # 19
by unknown (This does kind of sound like a matrix rip-off now that I think about it).
“So our devices, instruments and inventions will effect us and allow us to do what they do if we would only break out of our social stratum and be feed of our mind chaining us to what we are taught is reality.”

Ezekiel
by Ezekiel
“Now will I shortly pour out my fury upon thee, and accomplish mine anger upon thee: and I will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense thee for all thine abomination.” (Sorry, didn’t expect one of these verses, but it was the seventh sentence of the seventh chapter.)

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allen Poe
by the one and only
“It was at Venice, beneath the covered archway there called the Ponte di Sospiri, that I met, for the third or fourth time the person of whom I speak.”

I also like to do my tarot at http://www.facade.com. It’s free and it is pretty fun.

I want to read more interesting books this year, so I think doing this every 3 books I read will be great and lots of fun, and motivating in a strange way. Here we go.

The Artists Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,
by Julia Cameron.
“The directions are important here”

What a hoot, I had to go back to the site to figure them out because I forgot.

Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires
by Esther andf Jerry Hicks
“In other words, because of what so many have lived and are living, and because of the summoning power of so many of their desires, the Well Being of your future experience is well in place”.

Visions
by Michio Kaku
“But unlike Sellers, Collins rides to work at the NIH on a Honda Nighthawk 750 motorcycle wearing a black leather jacket.”

The more interesting sentence in this set is number three;
“Perhaps the most pivitol and controversial of all the divisions of the NIH is the Human Gename Project(officially the National Center for Human Genome Research), one of the most ambitious projects in medical history, a $3 billion crash program to locate all the genes within the human body by 2005″.

sandyg

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, by Kurt Vonnegut

“As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”