How to turn shit into potable water!
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Related source » The Economics of Settlement
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]
“The root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil, according to a broad consensus of the international media and the considered cerebrations of the deepest-thinking movie stars, is Israeli settlers in what are described as the "occupied territories" on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy put the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies. Remove the settlers, according to these sage analyses of the scene, and the problems of the region become remediable at last. […] Israelis now purify and recycle some 95 percent of the nation's sewage, including imports of sewage from the West Bank and Gaza -- "They sell us sewage and we give them potable water," said one Israeli official. Israel is pioneering ever more efficient forms of drip irrigation and gains some 50 percent of its water from world-leading desalinization plants. With an array of new hydrological innovations, Israel provides the crucial answers to the acute water crisis that afflicts the Middle East and much of the rest of the world. Just as the Israeli settlers enabled the emergence of an economy in Palestine, so they offer the prospect of saving the entire region from water exhaustion and poverty after the oil boom ends. […] Meanwhile, contrary to all the floods of mendacious propaganda purveyed by an ever-gullible mainstream media, Netanyahu's bold economic and humanitarian policies in the West Bank and Gaza have succeeded in fostering a brisk economic revival in the territories, with a recovery rate of near 10 percent in Gaza alone. As George Will acerbically noted in a particularly brilliant column, "Turkey was claiming to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, a land with higher incomes and longevity than Turkey itself." Israel's unparalleled achievements in industry and intellect have fanned the familiar anti-Semitic frenzies among all the economically and morally failed societies of the socialist and Islamist Third World from Iran to Venezuela. They all imagine that by delegitimizing, demoralizing, defeating, and, ultimately, destroying Israel, they will take an enormous step toward bringing down the entire capitalist West.” [emphasis added]
— By George Gilder, 2011/06/08 (spectator.org)
I am a retired physicist, and I am proud, justly I think, of the contributions made by physicists the world over, down through the ages, to the general knowledge and welfare of humanity. Nevertheless, it is my firm belief that economists, who developed their theories, specifically free market capitalism, in and for the advancement of the Western human condition, are owed a special debt of gratitude by the entire world.
If anything is to turn things around for the human condition that is in a seemingly inexorable decline, it will not, repeat not, be through the misguided advocacy of ignoramuses like Barack Obama, his millions of economics-challenged supporters, as well as his ridiculously inept advisers.
It is probably hopeless to expect a timely awakening of sane policy-making at this late date. Economics literacy doesn't grow on trees. It is not pretty; and, in fact, it tends to be messy, even counter-intuitive on occasion. But it is essential to know and understand if the world is to extract itself from a hit-or-miss (historically overwhelmingly "miss") approach to solving its most intractable problems.
Post 1,651 It's the econom-ics, stupid!
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