Strategies for the future
Chess is a beautiful game, limited to a small board and 16 pieces per side, as opposed to an expansionist, grab-all-you-can game like go.
The Ukraine conflict shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing chess, while US President Barack Obama is playing checkers. Russia dominates Europe’s energy supply, meaning Putin holds all the trump cards.
The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) is proposing sensible policies and reform, especially of the budget and silly laws. The TSU is the only group playing chess against China.
Taiwan’s unique economy would boom if wise leaders started small and medium-sized enterprises.
Any well-informed adult knows that while today’s wars are fought over oil, future wars will be fought over water.
The Baltic Dry Index — cash paid to ship things internationally — is bouncing along the bottom. The global economy is slowing and countries everywhere are facing sovereign debt crises, notably Argentina.
After the US dollar loses its “almighty” status, there will be major changes to the global economic system.
Taiwan needs to become much more self-reliant while there is time, because in a worst-case scenario imports and exports could be cut off, meaning people would have to share what they produce.
Taiwan should leverage the brilliance of its university students to start a program whereby huge, unneeded boats are converted into massive floating solar and Fresnel lens-powered water purifying machines.
Such boats would be invaluable to poverty-stricken Haiti, a diplomatic ally.
Also, Crimea, which voted to rejoin Russia in what appears to be a legitimate election, just lost their water supply from “across the strait” in Ukraine.
Subsidence in Taiwan, where farmers are pumping out aquifers, concerns water. Radioactive waste from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Japan being pumped, at great expense, into south Taiwanese fish farms concerns water.
I previously predicted that the next crisis would be about oil and indeed the Middle East/Africa conflagration has been raging for decades thanks to former US president Richard Nixon and the CIA, with former British politician and diplomatic adviser Mark Sykes and former French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot also to blame for putting the world on an unavoidable path toward pollution and eventual self-destruction.
Nixon’s co-conspirator, Henry Kissinger, and Obama will go down as the worst Nobel Peace Prize winners in history.
It was a little shocking to learn that a study by the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources found that approximately 55 percent of China’s 50,000 rivers that existed in the 1990s have disappeared.
Investors and entrepreneurs should be looking into ways to provide clean water to those in need, using new technologies and surplus maritime hardware.
If all marine life dies off within the next several years, as I predicted in 2009, fishermen in Suao Township (蘇澳), Yilan County, will need to be retrained for a different industry. Again, Fukushima does not help here.
Playing chess requires players to look beyond the next move and see the future trends.
The oil, air, soil and water trends for Earth do not look good. As an island, Taiwan needs to start now to invest in resilience.
Torch Pratt
New Taipei City
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