September 5th, 2008
The Republican National Frat Party came to a conclusion last night while I was watching online videos of dogs jumping on trampolines. We got rid of the television in the Fortified Mountain Compound right around the time when the major cable media outlets all started looking like Fox News.
I wasn’t missing it on a night like last night, when the Grand, but mostly just Old Party celebrated their nomination of Senator John McCain with a selection of rousing chants ranging from, “Drill baby drill! Drill baby drill!” to “USA! USA!”
Now I’ll get into the drilling issue later, because it’s become a critical part of the Republican campaign mantra in the last few months, but there’s something worth noting for all of you out there like me who only listened to the speeches last night.
I didn’t feel like I’d missed much, until I saw a set of close-up photos of Sen. McCain taken during his speech. Then I was wishing that I’d seen the thing in real time. The GOP event organizers, in all of their great wisdom, had done it again. For several minutes they posed their candidate in front of a simple green background.
I’d like to introduce those listeners out there unfamiliar with video production to the concept of a chroma key. This is a technique for mixing images together in the same frame dating back to the late 1930s, slightly after John McCain was born.
Perhaps this is why his campaign has yet to catch on to the concept, after all it has only been used in motion picture film-making since 1940. Better known as a blue screen, the technique requires that an actor stand in front of an even-colored blue background which can then be cut out of the image, leaving only the actor to be positioned in front of literally anything.
It’s most often done these days with a green background, which digital cameras prefer. John McCain, who yesterday exhorted us to catch up with history, isn’t a digital kind of guy. That’s perhaps the best explanation for his second appearance in front of a green background, begging, just simply begging to be superimposed over an old-timey western, or maybe a campaign background from a 1930s newsreel where everybody sounds like they’re chain-huffing helium.
It’s only appropriate, in my mind, to make him look and sound as old as possible, because this man who doesn’t use a computer, and can’t read a tele-prompter, had the gall to demand that America catch up with history.
Mr. McCain, you are history, and it’s time for you to recognize that America has left you and your party to its dustbin.
It gets worse, of course. That green background for the Senator’s close-ups was a lawn. People watching the speech had several minutes to wonder why the Senator was speaking in front of a non-descript, but vaguely institutional building.
Thanks to Talking Points Memo, we now know that the building in question was Walter Reed. Not Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, which was surely the intention, and would have made sense, but Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood. If he can’t make a distinction between Sunnis and Shiites, I guess that it’s too much to ask of the McCain campaign to distinguish between an Army Hospital in our nation’s capital and a middle school in California.
And so here we are, sweeping out the trash bin once again, on the Timothy Jordan Show News for the 5th of September, Ought-Eight.
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Drill baby drill, and for the oil industry shill baby shill.
Yes, the Republican party has decided to make offshore oil exploration and drilling in wildlife refuges a core of their campaign platform, right alongside a ban on gay marriage and further tax cuts for the wealthy and big industries.
It’s caught on with the party faithful, who took up the chant, “Drill baby drill!” at a moment’s notice all throughout the GOP convention.
The idea is that new offshore oil exploration will lead to price drops in oil and greater energy independence for the country. This is how it’s being pushed with all the honesty of a car salesman in a seersucker suit.
To begin with, what they really mean is oil drilling off of Florida and California. The only remaining viable oil fields off of the eastern and western seaboards are along the coasts of Florida and Southern California. Between them it’s a miniscule area, and offers to satisfy only a fraction of our nation’s growing energy needs.
Then there’s the time to delivery that must be considered. Gov. Palin, Sen. McCain, and all of the other oil shills speaking in the last few days have been describing oil drilling as if the word could be given tomorrow, and oil flowing by the end of the business day Monday.
This is simply not true. Oil fields have to be developed, and as anyone who works for a living, unlike the political talking heads we’ve been seeing for the past few weeks, knows that development takes time.
Most importantly, wells need to be drilled. If they’re offshore, that drilling has to be performed by specialized ships able to maintain a precise position in the water for days at a time. These are ships specialized enough, and offshore drilling is rare enough, that not many are actually in operation. Of those that are out and working in the world, they’re out and working. There simply isn’t capacity in the oil services industry to embark on a massive offshore oil-drilling program without a lead time measured in years.
Oil fields take decades to develop. Take the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for example. The coastal 1002 area of the refuge has long been a target for advocates of drilling. By all accounts there is a significant amount of oil under the surface, worth billions at current prices. And by all accounts it would take eight to ten years after exploratory drilling began for the full production capacity to come online.
That’s all fine, so we can show that drilling today isn’t even close to being a solution for our energy problems tomorrow; but there’s something else to consider: oil is not gasoline.
Oil has to be refined, and our refineries are already operating at capacity. The first new refinery project to begin construction in over thirty years will break ground sometime in the next year on 3,300 acres of South Dakota farmland. That project will be dedicated entirely towards processing low-grade oil shale and sand from Alberta. It couldn’t handle offshore crude even if it was remotely close to a coastline.
So what’s the story? We’re being sold a truckload of hooey. (Man, I can’t wait until we’re podcast-only, and I can use a real word, instead of hooey.) Senator Obama, for all of his positive points, has failed to point out the Emperor’s bare ass. Instead of challenging GOP claims that drilling, baby, drilling is the solution to our energy issues, he’s gone along and spoken in favor of some limited drilling.
Sure, this is like the token effort that President Clinton made in his day to silence missile defense critics. He funded additional research, and bought into the lie. It looked pretty harmless at the time, but now we’ve spent hundreds of billions on a missile defense system that’s never really been tested.
The test here will be to see if Senator Obama is smart enough to ask his opponent, “So you want to drill for oil? Just how do you think that’s going to work?”
• Sioux City Journal, Union County Approves Zoning Ordinance for Hyperion
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Things work differently in other countries. We can look no further than Brazil to see just how differently. The Reuters news agency reported this week that the Brazilian National Intelligence Agency was caught illegally wiretapping the phones of high-ranking elected officials and members of the Brazilian Supreme Court.
In response, Brazilian President Luiz Lula de Silva suspended the entire senior leadership of his country’s intelligence agency.
Unfortunately for Americans, our own Supreme Court has yet to realize that they themselves have no idea if they’re being wiretapped by our government, and that right now, even if they were, one letter from the Attorney General would make it legal.
And here’s where, in the next few weeks, after we’ve transitioned to a podcast-only format, I will be using a cohort of strong words to express my extreme displeasure with our nation’s elected and appointed checks and balances for turning a blind eye to overt violation of the Constitution.
• Reuters, Lula suspends Brazil spy chiefs over phone taps
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And in related news of lawbreaking by national figures, we got word from Wired’s Threat Level team that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was in the habit of repeatedly violating security laws.
According to a report by the Office of Inspector General, documents relating to the warrantless wiretapping program, including handwritten notes prepared by Gonzales to brief Congressional leaders, documents which are so secret that they can’t even be provided to judges overseeing wiretapping lawsuits, were habitually stored by the Attorney General in unapproved safes.
The wiretapping documents were classified Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information, the highest publicly acknowledged classification level. These are crown jewels kind of secrets, Constitutional violation kind of secrets.
The investigation revealed that while a perfectly acceptable safe was available just a few doors down from the Attorney General’s office, he preferred to keep them, and only them, in his office safe, in violation of Federal handling procedures for classified material.
In addition, Gonzales retained a safe installed at his house by the Executive Office of the President, rather than use a safe provided by the Justice Department. Curiously, the Program Manager responsible for swapping Gonzales’ White House-supplied safe with a safe approved for classified DoJ materials was told by the White House that there wasn’t a record of the safe in the Attorney General’s home, and that none of the factory default combinations for the safe worked.
So we have a safe provided by the Executive Office, not registered on the books, being used to illegally store classified materials. Is this a product of incompetence, or malice? Knowing these guys, it was probably both.
The Office of Inspector General sent their report, with references to the Federal laws broken, to the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. They declined to prosecute.
Insert strong words here.
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You’re going to be all right with me swearing a bit in that first podcast-only episode, right Tim? I mean, I have a lot of expletives built up inside me after reporting on these hooey-huckers for the last eight years.
It’s going to be excellent, but we’ll all have to wait for the deluge. In the meantime, some more concrete excellence. It’s…
It’s actually concrete. No, really. Concrete, excellent concrete.
Well, it’s not really the concrete that’s excellent, but the tools for laying it down. Contour Crafting is the brainchild of Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Southern California.
Not too long ago the first 3-d printers appeared on the market. They all work by different principles, but the result is something like a desktop printer that can rapidly make complex three dimensional shapes.
That’s fine for small-scale rapid prototyping, but Contour Crafting is taking it to another level: they’re working with concrete. Their machine is a concrete printer.
As they describe it, “Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.”
So that’s pretty incredible. Imagine a disaster area, where thousands of homes have been destroyed. There are families who need shelter. One of these machines could create a block of durable homes in a few days.
Even better, and dare I say excellent, is that their fabricators don’t need human supervision. Supplied with raw materials and a set of instructions, they’ll build whatever you need, wherever you need… like on the moon.
They can work with concrete, plastic, or ceramics, shape them in several dimensions, and prepare for human habitation without a person on site.
The systems were first described two years ago, and should be working out in the world in the coming months, and that’s damn excellent. Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis and Contour Crafting are this week’s winners of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
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And that’s the News for the 5th of September, Ought-Eight.