Los Angeles is burning down, and somehow I’m not surprised.

Having passed through last year’s fires on a beer-related mission to the City of Angels, where flames from Malibu crested the ridges overlooking I-5, extending the charred zone to the road’s shoulder, I can vouch for the total flammability of the Los Angeles basin.

The season’s hot offshore winds roll out of the San Gabriel mountains, fanning the flames of wildfire before driving smoke and ash, the dark-burning residue of suburban homes, into the stale skies above a decidedly hellish City of Angels.

The grey ceiling of smog and industry that once characterized LA is usually enough to make me want to turn back. Now pour ten thousand acres of charred chaparral into the mix and the southward drive along Interstate 5 begins to look like a descent into apocalypse. When it’s bad, really bad, towering flames ripple along the ridge lines.

This is what the end of the world looks like.

The scary thing is that this day we’ve enjoyed, and this unseasonably warm mid-November weekend, is just as much a sign of the end. It was pushing 80 degrees today; and it was dark at 5pm.

I’m not sure if there’s any clearer indication of climate change. We should be wearing sweaters.

Next week we probably will be, but it’s not as simple for the plants and animals around us to adjust. The trees are confused. There isn’t enough light for it to be this warm outside.

One or two odd days like this aren’t going to kill our redwoods tomorrow. The indicators are, unfortunately, that unseasonable days like these will happen more frequently; and as the plants around us struggle with conflicting biological triggers, they’re going to start dying.

Enjoy it while it lasts, California.

By a nearly 2-1 margin you just voted down a ballot initiative, Prop 7, that would have made our state the global model for aggressive climate change reform. We could have set the standard, but instead we’re just standard.

Los Angeles is burning down, and somehow I’m not surprised.

Sucking on a lemon, this is your Timothy Jordan Show News for the 16th of November, Ought-Eight.

——

We’re not the only ones puckering up this weekend.

A quorum of Iraq’s Cabinet ministers voted to support a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with our government, providing a legal framework for the continued presence of the U.S. military inside Iraq.

The SOFA, which calls for a withdrawal of U.S. personnel from Iraqi cities by June of next year, and a wholesale withdrawal from the country by the end of 2011, is the product of months of tense negotiations. It also remains to be seen if enough U.S. concessions have been made to see the Agreement passed by the Iraqi Parliament.

There remain deep divisions even within the Cabinet. Several ministers refused to appear for the signing, and several representing major Sunni and Shiite factions either abstained, or voted against the agreement.

While the actual text of the agreement doesn’t seem to be anywhere, reporting on it in the LA Times indicates that U.S. negotiators agreed to major concessions in order to win approval. Under the new law U.S. troops would be subject to prosecution under Iraqi law in cases of murder, and need permission before conducting raids on civilian homes.

The SOFA’s future is far from certain. Prime Minister al-Maliki has said that he won’t bring the bill before Parliament until he’s certain of receiving the 2/3 majority needed for passage. The Iraqi Parliament is scheduled to go into recess on the 24th, so Maliki has less than two weeks of working days left to convince opponents of the agreement.

The other deadline to keep in mind is the expiration of the existing SOFA at the end of this year. Without that agreement there would be no basis in Iraqi law for the continued presence of the U.S. military. This isn’t a gradual withdrawal kind of thing.

It’s also preposterous to think that the U.S. military could pack up 150,000 personnel, an even larger number of private contractors, and all of their equipment by the 1st of January.

Some kind of deal will be reached in the next few weeks because there isn’t any other choice. But don’t be surprised if the Iraqis come back next week with a shortened timetable for withdrawal.

• via LA Times, Cabinet approves plan for total U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011

• via CRS, Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA): What Is It, and How Might One Be Utilized In Iraq? PDF

——

Closer to home the economic news was bad… really bad. The last few months just saw the single greatest decline in consumer retail spending since the 1992 recession.

This news comes just as we approach the holiday retail buying season, where most stores large and small make the bulk of their yearly revenue. Corporate financial reports for the 4th quarter are not going to be pretty.

The situation is bad enough that not even this coming week’s loss of productivity in 16-35 year olds will make much of a difference. Activision Entertainment released the long-awaited expansion to their online interactive crack den, World of Warcraft, last Thursday.

Tens of thousands of young people eager to get their hairy palms on the game a few hours before everyone else lined up for midnight store openings around the world on Wednesday evening. Only 27 hours later the first player reached the new maximum level in the game.

All of the newly released content was beaten by a group of European gamers by midday Saturday.

Now my staff and their friends have also been at it since Thursday, but they do things like eat, go outside, sleep, and crap in toilets instead of buckets… or whatever these lunatics who have been playing for three days straight do in order to beat the game before the end of the release weekend.

The World of Warcraft franchise has been earning Blizzard, now owned by Activision, upwards of a billion dollars per year largely through sales of game cards and monthly subscriptions.

We offer our condolences to listeners who may have lost a loved one to the game for the last few days. They will get better.

——

Our Federal government is poised to get better as well, to the benefit of net neutrality.

First reported by Wired, the Obama transition team has named two key net neutrality advocates to lead the Federal Communications Commission review team.

Susan Crawford is a former member of the ICANN internet governing board, and a long-standing critic of the corporate takeover of the internet.

She’s being joined by Ken Werbach, a former FCC lawyer in the Clinton Administration and organizer of the Supernova technology conference series.

Both of them are outspoken critics of attempts by the major telecoms to create a system of tiered access, where online content would be biased towards companies and individuals able to pay more. A tiered system would, for instance, encourage Walmart to pay for faster delivery of its website, while content from a competitor’s site was slowed or routed along a longer path.

Net neutrality means that instead Walmart’s content can’t be privileged over anyone else’s. In a content-neutral Internet your email and Walmart’s website are treated exactly the same by the hardware responsible for handing packets of data from one place to another online.

The appointments of Werbach and Crawford to the transition team indicate that an Obama administration will be favoring freedom of information on a content neutral internet.

They will be in charge of reviewing current FCC policy, as well as making FCC staff and policy recommendations to their incoming President.

Crawford told attendees at the 2008 Tech Policy Summit that “… we’ve failed to have a U.S. industrial policy pushing forward high speed internet access penetration,” and that, “there’s been completely inadequate competition.”

She added, in words that will be sending shivers through AT&T and Comcast in the wake of her appointment to the transition team that, “This really is a utility. This is like water, electricity, sewage systems. Things that every American needs to succeed in a modern era.”

Audio of her full comments can be found linked, as with all other source material, at timothyjordan show * com.

We are quite excited around the offices here about the incoming team at the FCC, and we hope that their firings go well, because there are a lot of Bush-appointed industry shills in the Commission that need a swift boot.

• Wired, Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC

• Tech Policy Summit, Susan Crawford remarks (Roundtable- Leading the Way In Broadband Innovation

——

In other news of the transition, the Senate Judiciary Committee has sent a letter to the White House, reminding them to not destroy key administration policy documents on their way out.

Of particular concern to the Committee are the justifications for both the warrantless wiretapping program and the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers.

Those documents, the crown jewels of the administration, were at last report being held in a safe in the office of David Addington, Chief Counsel to Vice President Cheney.

Addington took over the position of Chief of Staff from Lewis “Scooter” Libby, following Libby’s conviction on perjury charges. It is unknown whether Addington, the architect of the Bush Administration’s worst abuses, brought the documents with him to his new office.

It is believed that these are the only physical copies in existence. Their location in or out of Addington’s safe is insignificant so long as they remain within the office of the Vice President. Cheney’s staff continues to wage a legal battle with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over the legal status of the Vice President’s office. Cheney’s lawyers continue to insist that he exists in a previously unknown fourth branch of the government, attached to the Senate, funded by the Executive, but answerable to the laws of neither.

The court has ordered that Cheney’s staff preserve all existing documents while the case is being fought, but Senator Leahy and the other members of the Judiciary Committee are still concerned enough to send a letter warning that whatever the Vice President believes, at least one branch of the government intends to hold him to the law of the Presidential Records Act.

This would, of course, require that Congress actually do something if Cheney and his staff continue to be uncooperative. My own expectations are that there’s a turkey’s chance of making it through Thanksgiving that they’ll hold the Vice President to the letter of the law.

We’ll keep our expectations low until the first round of whistleblowers starts talking on the 20th of January.

• Judiciary warning letter from Leahy to Fielding PDF

——

How about your expectations of excellence? They should be going sky high, right about now. It’s…

Excellence could have gone this week to an incredible home-built belt-driven wasp-sucking machine. It sucks… wasps.

• Wasp Sucker

It also could have gone to an experimental plasma torch power plant being constructed in Florida. The plant will be able to generate 60MW of power while vaporizing 1,500 tons of trash per day.

• via SciAm, Plasma Turns Garbage into Gas

Both pretty cool, though you’d really have to see the wasp-sucker in action to appreciate it, but this week’s winner is just plain excellent.

It’s a flying car.

A functional flying car.

The brainchild of British inventor Gilo Cardozo, the Parajet Skycar is a lightweight dune-buggy with a bio-fuel engine and a ducted fan on the back.

The fan doesn’t make the car fly. It’s the paraglider wing that makes the car fly.

The beauty of this is that it’s so simple. Most flying cars going back to the 1950s have used some kind of bulky fixed wing that needs to be deployed or attached in order to take off.

The Parajet has instead a simple paraglider wing that can be folded down to the size of a large backpack when not in use. Since it’s a paraglider, there isn’t any pilot training to go through.

Some numbers:

A take-off speed of 35mph.

A top speed of 60mph.

A 150 mile range.

And a cruising altitude of up to 15,000 feet.

Oh, and on the road, it goes 0-60 in 4.5 seconds using a bio-fueled 4-stroke rotary engine.

Conversion between fight and driving takes three minutes, according to the company.

They’re currently gearing up for an expedition in the prototype from London to Timbuktu in January, traversing some of the most hostile terrain on the planet.

Now that’s ballsy, and it’s also excellent. It’s a real badass flying car, for which Gilo Cardozo wins this week’s Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.

• Parajet Skycar

• Skycar Expedition 2009

And that’s the News for the 16th of November, Ought-Eight.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 8:02 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.