EM. A bootiful New Year's Eve provocation. A clear declaration of how you mean to go on.

A profitable New Year to all and I hope you are not too disappointed when Trump disappoints and Brexit gets more complex.

Entropic Man, would you prefer a further deterioration in East/West relations culminating in Nuclear war?

It seems that Obama/Clinton/Blair/EU have inflamed the Middle East, Ukraine and now Russia. It is obvious how wrong they have all been, as most people want to live in peace.

I am no fan of Putin, or the corruption that runs through the entire administration of most (all?) former Iron Curtain Countries. I have worked abroad and in the UK with people who got out of such countries, because they were sick of the fraud and corruption, and wanted to live and work in a country where hard work was rewarded, rather than corruption and nepotism.

Putin's refusal to escalate the situation with tit-for-tat expulsions, on the basis that Obama is not acting rationally in the death throes of failed Progressive corruption, does suggest a better future in troubled areas. If East and West are singing from similar hymn sheets, don't you think things may improve, or would you prefer further warfare, whether by indirect proxies or more direct confrontation?

What is your logic behind the bitch comment?

So that protester in August was right.

Trump is Putin's bitch.

Trump and Putin are strong, confident and magnanimous and don't need to engage in childish provocations.

Yes. A weak and ineffectual president wanting to prove how tough he is is very scary. But, as Scott Adams said, (very soon) adults are in charge.

Actually it was not the Russkies that hacked the Clinton server. It was a schoolkid in Acton who logged on to a Russian porn server, via an anonymising service and hacked in from there, leaving Russian IP addresses in the logs. It turned out the the password on the Clinton server was "chelsea".

@Tomo
Not a lot !

Pcar, weird how Obama is the confrontational Warmonger, allowing Trump to be the Peacemaker.

stewgreen 8:43, agree that it is a PR war! Sometimes the PR is not wrong.

A "sealed tank" exists in theory in a domestic water system, but in practicality, it doesn't. As soon as water is drawn from the tank, it must be "made-up" with more water, or by air, or the tank will collapse. Yachts can use "collapsible" water storage tanks (glorified tough polythene bags) to stop water sloshing about, and because they are cheap and flexible enough to be easily plumbed in and stuffed into odd-shaped lockers and voids.

Bermuda has a rapidly growing population, including tourists, and a finite supply of catchable rainwater.

Desalination on a ship is easy. You pump in raw seawater to cool the engine. This water gets hot. By putting it in a low pressure chamber (less than atmospheric pressure) the hot sea water boils at less than 100c. Condense the steam, and you have fresh water. It requires almost no energy or fuel to run, and is not very expensive to incorporate during construction.

Desalination on a sailing yacht generally requires an engine running to generate electricity. Seawater is pumped at pressures 55-60 Bar (?), through very fine filters. The salt is filtered out. This is known as Reverse Osmosis (RO). The electricity required to generate the pressure is "considerable", and the filters are expensive, requiring regular maintenance. Transatlantic Rowers will have mini RO units running off a solar charged battery, to produce drinking water only.

Oil rich states can generate "unlimited" freshwater by using seawater in their powerstations, and this allows them to burn off the thicker fractions of crude oil, that the market doesn't want to pay very much for. I don't know if RO via solar is carried out on a commercial scale using solar WITHOUT there being mains electrical backup.

The Bahamas are not oil rich! They can afford to buy oil, to generate electricity, and make fresh water. I don't expect that the Green Blob would like that, and prefer to blame the water shortage on Global Warming.