Being a Futurama fan, I've always wanted to say this but could not find the propitious moment. Writing about water scarcity & food shortages is taxing and angers me at times particularly when I come across disheartening news caused by blatant greed and callous disregard for our planet.

However, a huge dose of human ingenuity, human creativity and human toil will right the wrongs. I have great faith in humanity and this diary is dedicated to the good folks out there bursting their synapses coming up with novel ways of making the world less dependent on fossil fuels, working out solutions to feed the planet and generally trying to make this earth a better place (if you look at the human brain from say, 150,000 years ago, you will not see much difference when compared with today's brains. Yet the drive to learn, as well as our ability to communicate and work collectively, has lifted our human potential to unimaginable levels.)

Water is Life, yet over 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water and over 2 billion lack basic sanitation. As you know, due to increasingly lower availability of water in many parts of the world, water has more and more become a political commodity.

A recent Gallup Poll showed that Americans perceived polluted drinking water as more of a threat than climate change, with 53% saying that they worried "a great deal" about it and 37% expressing the same level of concern over global warming. Gallup noted that pollution of drinking water has been a major concern since 1990.

I have rarely detested someone in my life as much as I detest  John McCain. When I lived in L.A. (89 to 94) I traveled quite a bit throughout the States. Once driving with my family to visit a friend in Hillsborough (NM) we stopped overnight in Tucson. After finishing a meal in the hotel where we stayed, I wandered about and spotted the lounge, it was empty and thought that it would be a good place for a nightcap and quiet enough for my daily crosswords. The bar was tendered by a man who would have been in his late seventies. Coming from a hotelier family, I thought, this is cool, must be the owner or a close relative (my own great grandfather used to do a spot of bar tending at the tender age of 81, kept him sharp, used to say).

I love the Vermonters, they have it right.

The good folks of Brattleboro, Vermont, will vote at town meeting on whether President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should be indicted and arrested for war crimes, perjury or obstruction of justice if they ever step foot in Vermont. Wouldn't that be nice?

First a few facts: Water in numbers.

1% is the amount of the world's water currently fit for human consumption.
97% is the percentage of Earth's water that is saltwater.
6% is the amount of world's freshwater that will be processed in desalination facilities by 2015, (which is roughly double of the current amount)
2 billion is the number of people the UN estimates will lack sufficient water by 2050.

Two days ago I wrote what I thought was my most optimistic diary ever, posted it at Daily Kos, and I got 5 comments, 2 of them from me. I may have made the mistake of not inserting the word Impeachment or Breaking in it. Perhaps it was a little too buoyant for its own good.
Who knows and really, who cares!

Having noted an abundance of pessimistic diaries on how we're going to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age and the ever growing number of Kossacks who think, rightly or wrongly, that Cheney And Chimpee are not going to leave in 09, I thought that I would offer you, my fellow co-posters, a ray of hope. Or two, and more.

Mean-Spirited: the state of being characterized by a malicious or petty spirit.

Sounds familiar? Let's take a look at another version:

I nearly choked on my cereals as I was reading a major article this morning on the UK Independent titled "A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi". I was about to start writing another one of my series of "In Vino Veritas", to be posted tonight, but after reading the article I no longer had the energy nor the gumption to proceed. I felt sick. I couldn't move.

What does China and John Lennon have in common, you may ask. Not much. But if he were alive today he would be doing his outmost to point the finger at China, its slave labor practices and its huge financial involvement in Sudan.