Over the years I’ve had a number of silly ideas about how to solve the middle east problem, or various little bits of it. Surely none would work, but they were amusing to think about.
I was re-reading this article I wrote….
and I was reminded of one of them, speaking as I was of buying land.
For years and years lots of people have been upset with the idea of israel. They just don’t want it to exist or something. I’m not an expert in the field, I only remember dribbles of what I read and hear, but I know part of the problem is that lots of people believe that the land that israel inhabits is more special than other bits of land around it.
So there have been wars and terrorist attacks and other venting-of-anger activities.
What I don’t get is: Why, if so many people are so interested in owning the land israel occupies, they don’t just buy it.
Save up your money, don’t spend it on guns and military training, put it in a high yield investment of some kind, or start a crowdfunding venture called “Buy israel” and when you have enough money to buy some…. Buy it. Just like in the game monopoly.
Over enough time, if you buy more and more of it, you’ll eventually have the whole thing, and don’t worry, there is no plop of land so valuable that somebody isn’t willing to give it up for enough money.
In a barely related note, after the 1979 oil crisis (the fist one I remember) I had another idea how to solve another little part of the middle east problem.
Oil oil oil everybody wants oil. OPEC carries whims of the world on its finger based on what price they choose to sell oil at. Or at least they used to, to some degree.
For all the years I can remember, the effort was always ‘rely less on oil’ and ‘make cars more efficient’ and ‘do whatever you can to become less dependent on oil from the middle east’. As a long term solution that’s going to be a reality one way or another, but there’s a much more productive short term solution.
Use up all the oil as fast as you can. Buy that gas guzzler, keep the heat way up and turn on the air conditioning to compensate, get rid of those LED lights and get more manly incandescents.
The middle east countries that use oil as a bargaining chip can only bargain with it, if they have any left. If we use it all up, no more bargaining, no more chip, no more problem.
Of course it would get expensive near the end which would most certainly spur Mr. Science to come up with a solution to the lack of fuel for energy problem, but that’s going to happen anyway. With this simple technique we can rid the world of all those pesky people who fund themselves with oil money.
But the americans came along with their technology and fracked it all up. So that plan can’t work anymore. But maybe if we started doing it in the 70’s we’d have solved that problem by now, and could move on to new problems like self tying shoelaces.