I was in the supermarket this morning (nothing unusual in that) and pushing my trolley to the checkout. Well, my wife was pushing and I was away in airy-fairy land when it suddenly dawned on me that I was walking past water. Not just any water but a whole world of the stuff. A complete representation of nations: a veritable United Nations of water in one aisle...

There, in your local Supermarket: Highland Spring Water all the way from Scotland or water drawn from the speckled valleys in the Black Mountains of the Canadian Rockies. Or you prefer Continental European? How about Spa Reine Water from Germany (hope it wasn't a public Spa) or Vittel from the French Societe Generale des Eaux Minerales de Vittel, whatever that is.

Even Australia is represented by Wattle Water - Pure Water from the Australian outback and complete with a sprinkling of dust. And from the Continent of Africa comes "Oasis Pure" shipped out from the Negrev by Camel Train. China and Japan had ambassadors at the Supermarket I attended and the pictures on the bottles looked great, but the price of $4.50 was pushing my ability to grasp the essentials behind buying water a bit far.

How true the advertising of water is can be anybody's guess, but to me it seems a mite strange to ship small bottles of water half way across the world when a quite decent reservoir exists just up the road. I realize that in an effort to promote certain brands you can pay twice as much for water in a colorful green bottle or in a bottle shaped like a duck - but is it all so necessary.

The cost of this water is outrageous yet nobody seems to realize what they are actually doing when they faithfully buy bottled water everyday of the week. The way I see it is that people are buying water that comes from the other side of the world and costs them money that could be otherwise spent. Why not just go to the tap as we used to do and use the water from there? If concerned boil it, let it cool and put it in the fridge for later. That is what we used to do until all of these fancy and expensive bottles came on the scene.

In an attempt to understand this bottled water phenomena I decided to put the words "bottled" and "water" into the search engine on my computer. The first entry that came up surprised me greatly. There is a whole association dedicated to bottled water; a whole business geared up to its welfare. I mean I can understand the International Association for Rail Workers or for Medical Supplies, but the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) shocked me to the core. After this surprise I noticed that the whole Industry is massive, that not only this association exists but so do hundreds of others! Wow!

Anyway, it matters not. Looking through the IBWA site for inspiration I came to their "tip of the week" page. And here is the tip that they had for this week:

"Cool water is absorbed much more quickly than warm fluids and may help to cool off your overheated body". Source: Nutrition Information Center in partnership with IBWA

Must try and get hold of that book - only joking. Another piece that I found was Ed Ford's views on the matter of water:

"Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another".

I am completely stuck for something to say after reading that weird statement. I must move onto other things or I will end up trying to find this man to see if he is for real.

As a kid in Edinburgh (which is not that long ago) we always used to drink water from the tap. If you wanted a glass of water then go to the kitchen sink and open the cold tap, let it run for a few seconds, more to make it cold than to clear the line and then fill your glass. Final step: drink it. This was always the case and 99% of the population of Britain (one percent lived on whisky) lived quite happily in this way with no notable side-effects form the tap water. And then suddenly bottled water came on the scene and life changed without noticeable falter, now 100% of the population drink from bottles.

Edinburgh Water shocks a lot of people when they find out the cycle that it goes through before it arrives in the glass that they are busy drinking from. Recycled sewage water is the ingredient of the stuff now inside their stomachs at the point when they grasp what you are telling them.

Edinburgh has for many years removed the dung from the sewage (this used to be shipped out to sea in a special ship called the Gardyloo), it is then treated and passed through charcoal beds and retreated and analyzed endlessly before it is sent back into the system. And believe it or not Edinburgh has some of the highest quality water in Europe - and it comes straight from the tap!

Countries like Taiwan, the Philippines to name but a few do need treated water as the quality available from the tap could kill at ten yards. Taiwan has an extremely efficient system going - just go outside of your house to any one of the many machines dotted along the streets and by putting in 5NTD (8 pence) you will get a few gallons of clean and drinkable water in return. Not that the tap water is that bad (some waste chemicals and untreated sewage have been diverted to another river) and a boil in the kettle does me perfectly if I am feeling lazy.

(click to enlarge)

It seems to me as if the whole world is shifting water around constantly. Singapore is a good example of the state of water today. Singapore has to buy water from Malaysia to survive and without such the whole of the Singapore economy would grind to a halt. This water is actually under serious contention as Malaysia has been complaining that Singapore does not pay enough for the water they pump everyday.

The Malaysian state of Johor provides 350 million gallons of water per day to Singapore at $0.007 per 1000 gallons, while Singapore has to resell a minimum 17 million gallons per day of treated water to Johor at $0.13 per 1000 gallons. The price differential has prompted calls from numerous Malaysian politicians that Singapore is profiteering from the deal.

It also rankles the Malaysians that the price paid was derived from an agreement made decades ago and is still due to run for another few (until 2061). In basis: they want more for the water and Singapore doesn't want to pay. They are even threatening to go to war over this!

In an attempt by Singapore to reduce their reliance on Malaysia they have started a program to build recycling plants around the Island. Great idea -convert dirty water into drinking water - and although it will take many years before the balance changes it is a good start. I am not sure about their marketing campaign - you can buy this water from the chosen outlets and it is called "New Water". Sounds like a religious order.

The worlds shifting of water (despite Ed Ford's thinking that water made humans so that it can transport itself) is none greater than what is going on in China as we speak. The Three Gorges Dam! China's largest project since the Great Wall of China: and one with greater impact on China and the rest of the world than any other project underway today.

Some facts about the Three Gorges project:

• Project took 17 years; completion was in 2009.
• An estimated 250,000 workers are involved in the project.
• The Three Gorges Reservoir inundates 632 square kilometers (395 square miles) of land.
• An estimated 1.2 million people have been resettled by the dam.
• The project's 26 hydropower turbines are expected to produce up to one-ninth of China's output, 18.2 million kilowatts.
• The amount of concrete totals 26.43 million cubic meters, twice that of the Itaipu project in Brazil, currently the world's largest hydroelectric dam.

Source: Chinese government

Alongside of this massive shifting of natural resources we have the ice caps melting North and South of us, floods occurring worldwide where they should not and abnormal rainfalls flooding towns that usually do not see water for months on end. And of course the Meeting of Nations on the Supermarket shelves!

The world has water on the brain!

Almost three months now, with damage predicted for at least three decades, BP's war on all life is now a rounding success...

So it turns out with the placement of a better cap, that BP CAN stop the leak. Makes one wonder what motivated them to do so? Could it be the Coast Guard's insistence that "enough is enough", a magic command being all it took to do the job right?

I suspect something more sinister. Something lawyerly.

I mean, it makes sense that since it had already cost BP $700 million to drill to the point of the explosion, that they'd want to recover that investment by aiming to recover the well as opposed to plugging it. (And to just think, a $500k acoustic blowout preventer would have saved them tens of billions in clean up costs, makes me think of that ol' British saying; Pennywise and Pound Foolish).

Out at sea, there's the Corexit, a poisonous toxin (four times more toxic than crude oil and another product of the petroleum industry). Pumped into the oceans by the hundreds of millions of gallons to hide the death and destruction from the cameras in the sky... they would rather hide it than correct it... But why would they do this? Well ladies and gentlemen... cover up, yes, there has been a cover up, and if you have any doubt, just check out "What BP Hid: Our Gulf In Peril" by PuppetGov.com:

After watching such scenes, its understandable you might want to "tune it out" as I imagine the citizens of Hiroshima might have wanted to "tune out" their burning eyeballs and slouching off skin. But you MUSN'T. This is our fate, the fate of our planet. This effects ALL OF US. The oceans are our lungs, and they've just had billion of gallons of poison geysered down their esophagus. No, it is time to begin THINKING, and thinking begins with awareness.

First step; Get off oil. Sell the car. Live in an neighborhood near your work, cycle, shop, support your local businesses. The less oil in transport, the less extraction needed for manufacture, which itself can evolve to more sustainable ingredients. Don't give me that "how do you think they made that computer you're writing on?" bullcrap, two-thirds of oil goes to transport.

Second step; Demand political accountability. As big a joke as democracy has become, it is still marginally functional, and high time to re-imprint what it really means, so vote in leaders who will do right by the Earth and not just corporate interests. The West needs to vote in leaders who will immediately end our "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. These so-called "wars" are nothing more than ways for corporate defense contractors to reap billions from war profiteering at our expense.

The "war" in Afghanistan is not winnable. You are dealing with proudly backwards Muslim illiterates. If we really want to get rid of Al Queda and the Taliban hiding in the mountains then just cluster bomb up and down the border with Pakistan and then do it over and over again until there is nowhere left to hide.

Better yet, because of all the new minerals that have been discovered there, let China have all the rights to these and they will surely take care of the Muslims in rapid order, and it would be far better to have the Muslims angrier at China than the West. China does not have the same "moral" constraints that we soft Westerners have, they will do what is necessary when it comes to the evil sect of Radical Islam and its suicidal followers.

Sounds cynical, I know, and I point it out as only the unavoidable end progression of the current path. So why not something better, something less cynical?

Take those war budgets and put at least $500 billion a year (at least) into solar, wind and other clean electric technologies, then strip the oil industry of every last damn subsidy they undeservedly suck up and we'll feel the real cost of that oil addiction. Let Europe and America subsidize instead the manufacture of cheap electric, hydrogen, and air compression types of cars that already have been invented, which everyone can afford, and eliminate our need for oil and the huge deficits that oil wars cost. If we are going to go in debt I would rather it be done for sustainable renewable non-polluting energy than giving it to gamblers/bankers and their Wall Street bookies.

We should also do more solar and wind on the community level. A town of roughly 10,000 can get by on a solar array of about five acres. At the very least, outfit all homes with solar so that they draw from this and supply excess to the grid. Also if we do power generation on the Distributed Generation approach, it would be far less costly versus the big solar plants. Most cities, excepting maybe the largest like Los Angeles, New York, London, etc., have approximately 5 to 10 acres of usable land per 10,000 population to build on the community level, and then add on by outfitting home roofs and we will be set.

We need to start thinking about the future and getting big oil out of our pockets. This will also get rid of our "need" to be involved with the Medieval East, funding these Islamic regimes with our money for their oil so they can continue their goal of building a Global Challiphiate, which is really their end goal, at least according to their book and actions.

Let us end war by ending our need for oil, and end oil, by ending our need for war. The two go hand in hand...