[July 10 2008] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Since American Geographic Skills Are Sorely Lacking... A Historical Travelogue And Petro-Geographical Review Of The Persian Gulf - Free Archive Audio

In The News: The art of politics is "Compromise Solution". The shiny new FISA bill appears to protect American citizens from phone company spying... If the government and the phone company obey laws they didn't obey the last time. Hillary Clinton voted against it because of the retroactive immunity. Barack Obama and John McCain were MIA. Details. In other senate voting, the 10% cut in MediCare payments to doctors is surgically removed, and the recovering-from-brain-surgery Ted Kennedy was there to vote to eliminate the cut. More. John McCain calls a vet to speak at a PR affair and the vet CALLS HIM OUT! McCain answers none of his questions. More. Hamza bin-Laden, Osama's son, 16 years old, has a poem for us all, and he says he's going to lead the jihad. The Pentagon loses the power to grant a USAF re-fueling tanker contract after the original deal with the EU's AirBus gets examined by the legislature and found... corrupt? Hmmmm. A Boeing Grumman consortium will most likely get the contract now. Iran fires another round of missiles in the Persian Gulf across the strait of Hormuz(twenty miles across). See the Notes section below for a map. How long will the US military last without a plentiful supply of oil? Here's the 411 from the US Army that DOES NOT directly answer the question, but does shed light on the mayhem a shutdown, something a single sunk supertanker could cause, in the Straits of Hormuz:

DR: How much energy does the Army use? DF: The Army right now uses about ninety trillion BTUs in its facilities. And the ratio between facilities and the mobility, which are the fuels for the tanks and the helicopters and these kinds of things, that's about another twenty percent -- so somewhere around a hundred or a hundred and ten trillion BTUs. It's gone down significantly since say, 1985; there have been a lot of changes. And the Army, like all other government entities has goals to reduce its energy consumption, especially in its facilities. DR: Can you put that into perspective for our listeners? DF: If you look at the U.S. as a whole, the Department of Defense I believe uses about one-and-a-half percent of the nation's energy. The nation uses a hundred quads, roughly, and the U.S. military uses about one-and-a-half quads of energy. The Army is the smallest user in the Department of Defense; the large users are, of course, the Air Force and the Navy because they have all those airplanes to fly and all those ships to put on the sea and they're much more energy-intensive than the Army's mission. Although the Army has the biggest facility piece; it has more installations and bases, so it uses more installation energy than the other services. DR: And do you have an idea of what percentage of the Army's energy is provided by oil? DF: Facility-wise, it's not a very large percent. Our national economy uses about forty percent of its energy in oil, whereas the Army for on-site facility consumption represents about ten percent of the Army's consumption. So it's not a big piece of the use, although it's a very important piece. In full, a transcript of Donald Fournier: Oil depletion and the US Army

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"All The News You Never Knew You Needed To Know ...Until Now." Travus T. Hipp - Cabale News Service Recorded by The Buffalo In Da' Midst @ My Buffalo River Home Courtesy of Cabale New Service and KPIG Radio, Popout player below the fold in the "Notes".