Diversions. . .

• The world's water shortage is becoming less of a forecast and more of a reality - especially in China. CNN reports on just how bad things have got. Perhaps one day water will be more valuable than oil - and countries like New Zealand, Canada, Peru and Russia with their low population to water reserve ratios will become the new petro-states;

• Salon has an excellent interview with Richard Dawkins as he prepares to tour the USA to promote his latest book. Here's a sample from the heated phone interview:

What is so bad about religion?

Well, it encourages you to believe falsehoods, to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren't explanations at all. And this is particularly bad because the real explanations, the scientific explanations, are so beautiful and so elegant. Plenty of people never get exposed to the beauties of the scientific explanation for the world and for life. And that's very sad. But it's even sadder if they are actively discouraged from understanding by a systematic attempt in the opposite direction, which is what many religions actually are. But that's only the first of my many reasons for being hostile to religion.

My sense is that you don't just think religion is dishonest. There's something evil about it as well.

Well, yes. I think there's something very evil about faith, where faith means believing in something in the absence of evidence, and actually taking pride in believing in something in the absence of evidence. And the reason that's dangerous is that it justifies essentially anything. If you're taught in your holy book or by your priest that blasphemers should die or apostates should die -- anybody who once believed in the religion and no longer does needs to be killed -- that clearly is evil. And people don't have to justify it because it's their faith. They don't have to say, "Well, here's a very good reason for this." All they need to say is, "That's what my faith says." And we're all expected to back off and respect that. Whether or not we're actually faithful ourselves, we've been brought up to respect faith and to regard it as something that should not be challenged. And that can have extremely evil consequences. The consequences it's had historically -- the Crusades, the Inquisition, right up to the present time where you have suicide bombers and people flying planes into skyscrapers in New York -- all in the name of faith.

• Hugh Hendry and Linda Yueh discuss the importance of potash and how demand for the stuff is changing and how geo-politics are playing a part:

• A veganism advocate recants: Pinko-Greenie George Monbiot has an excellent article in The Guardian discussing Simon Fairlie's recently published Meat: A Benign Extravagance. He talks of the gross inefficiencies of intensive, confined farming of some animals, and that rearing animals for meat can become an efficient means of food production when the animals are pasture reared. He argues that increasing global meat consumption is sustainable, but not using the current farming model. The often cited 10:1 ratio of how much grain it takes to produce an equivalent weight of meat is more like 2:1 or even less, once the farming model is adjusted. He also debunks the argument that farming is killing water reserves to the extent it is and the high levels of greenhouse gases animals produce. The evidence has curious implications for low-cost meat and dairy producers like New Zealand, where ruminant farm animals largely eat pasture. Such low-cost production has been an enduring competitive advantage. But with Fairlie arguing that much of carbon generation from meat farming being generated further down the value chain in transportation, perhaps New Zealand's low-cost production advantage will whittle away once negative externalities like carbon generated from transportation are properly accounted for. I mentioned such a threat to New Zealand and its industries back in January in a post about Jeff Rubin. Well worth a read;

• Farm Geek has an interesting post on Peak Phosphate and whether New Zealand should get all protectionist about its phosphate supplies. Governments act in strange ways once a resource is labelled a "strategic resource";

• Wall Street and hedge funds using satellite surveillance to gather market-moving information? Yes, really;

• Paul Kedrosky on TechCrunch in a series of mini interviews talking about how we're now in a depression, the death of big VC, how airlines suck, and clean tech;

• Back on August 29 a guy disappeared off the beach in the Bahamas where parts of Jaws were shot. On September 4, a local investment banker caught a 4m shark near the same spot. When it was being landed, who popped out but parts of the guy that went missing the week before. Check it out;

• A great article from the New York Review of Books on how things are now in Dubai and how things have changed. Here's a paragraph:

During the past few months, I was told, Sheikh Mohammed has been trying to confront his dream’s collapse. He has said little publicly about the economic meltdown, other than issuing a handful of sunny pronouncements about Dubai. “Sheikh Mo is an angry man,” I was told by a source who knows him well; he feels “betrayed” by the real estate promoters who had assured him to the end that their ventures were healthy. According to my source, the sheikh has been taking long solo drives in his Mercedes at night, stopping in front of construction sites, and gazing pensively at the many vacant and half-built skyscrapers. Mohammed recently completed his autobiography for a US publisher with the assistance of a ghostwriter, but, a source in publishing said, he had refused to add a chapter about the bursting of the real estate bubble, the debt crisis, and the bailout by Abu Dhabi. He saw no reason to discuss these sources of humiliation. As a result, I was told, the book will never see the light of day.

• Ruth Richardson, former Finance Minister of New Zealand, was recently on CNBC arguing for a bit of Austrian Ruthanasia for near bankrupt Western states:

• And finally, from Wired: Why Russians Don't Get Depressed.