Author: Brian J. Noggle

Chavez: U.S. will ‘bite the dust’ if it invades:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told thousands of visiting students that if U.S. forces were to invade the South American country, they would be soundly defeated.

That cinches it. We must invade Valenzuela just to prove that our country is more manly than Hugo Chavez.

I also want to laud CNN for putting this story in perspective:

The U.S. government has strongly denied Chavez’s claims that it is considering military action against Cuba’s closest ally in the Americas.

That’s right, it’s not absurd on it’s face. No, it has been strongly denied by the warmongering American government.

Baldilocks captures a thought I had as well. When the Russians are in trouble with another one of their submarine-anchor conversion projects, who do they call?

In light of the planned war games between Russia and China, it is interesting that President Putin asked the US and the UK to assist in the rescue effort rather than the Chinese.

Well, yeah.

Hopefully, they called us in time for us to help out this time.

Extinct means the same as living in Italy? (Source.)

Bears have been extinct in Switzerland for more than 100 years until one was spotted last week that is believed to have migrated into the country from neighbouring Italy.

Environmental damage seen from shuttle

No word on whether the eagle-eyed spotters can see:

• The peaceful intentions of the Iranian nuclear program.
• The leaker of Valerie Plame’s identity.
• The last member of an individual species or two getting extinctated.
• Karl Rove performing an eldritch, unholy ceremony in Innsmouth to increase his power.
• The dark shadow of American hegemony creeping across the middle east.
• Grand Theft Auto actually altering the brain waves of another youth, inciting him to violence.
• Another shark preparing to attack a tourist in Florida.
• The National Hockey League discussing when to fire Gary Bettman.
• Paula Abdul sitting on her sofa with two empty quart containers of Häagen-Dazs Cherry Vanilla ice cream and a picture of Corey Clark, weeping, and occasionally shrieking, “Why did you do this to me, CC?”
• Robert Novak, stomping around and saying, “Bullshit!”
• A shark in Louisiana preparing to attack pit bull exiled from Denver.
• A saddened-but-following-orders animal control officer in Denver gassing a family pet who couldn’t escape to Louisiana.
• Thousands of world health officials scheming for more budget to combat their predicted avian flu pandemic while some unforeseen mutation of something else entirely is preparing to strike.
• Thousands of people who don’t deserve credit cards filling out the forms proffered them by the credit card agencies who then complain about default rates and raise interest on people who actually pay their debts.

Because those astronauts’ eyes are especially sharp, you know.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

At Q and O, inadvertently suggests a slogan for the Democrats when he says:

I wouldn’t trust the Democratic Party with national security, for instance, any farther than I could comfortably spit a rat.

The Democrats: You can trust as with national security as you can uncomfortably spit a rat.

I missed this last autumn when it appeared in the Washington Post as an advertisement funded by one man, but here is:

You’re a Republican???

In today’s America, ask a growing number of high school and college students; their teachers and professors; the self-anointed media elite and/or hard working men and women of all ethnicities, the question, “What is a Republican?”, and you’ll be told “… a rich, greedy, egotistical individual, motivated only by money and the desire to accumulate more and more of it, at the expense of the environment … the working poor … .and all whom they exploit…”

I am a Republican … I am none of those things… and I don’t know any Republicans who are.

Read the litany of what Republicans are. It’s our equivalent of Gordon Sinclair.

(This story has been confirmed by Snopes.)

As a member of the quality community in good standing (or ill repute, if you’re a developer), I wouldn’t get too excited about this headline: Unprecedented Shuttle Repair a Success:

A spacewalking astronaut gently pulled two potentially dangerous strips of protruding filler from Discovery’s tile belly with his gloved hand Wednesday, successfully completing an unprecedented emergency repair.

Well, the procedure was completed. As to its success or failure, I reserve judgment until that bird’s on the ground in the minimum number pieces are required for the astronauts’ survival.

Are Earth ice ages created by stars?:

It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help determine when North America is or isn’t buried under immense sheets of ice taller than skyscrapers.

But new research suggests that the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system’s passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way’s spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit showers of charged particles called cosmic rays.

Theorists have proposed that when our solar system passes through a spiral arm, the cosmic rays fall to Earth and knock electrons off atoms in the atmosphere, making them electrically charged, or ionized. Since opposite electrical charges attract each other, the positively charged ionized particles attract the negatively charged portion of water vapor, thus forming large droplets in the form of low-lying clouds.

In turn, the clouds cool the climate and trigger an ice age — or so theorists suggest.

Burning fossil fuels might be our only hope! We should run our cars overnight. We should also exterminate and bury entire species to ensure our future generations have fossil fuel to burn.

Or we could admit that our understanding of the universe and its component parts have great glaring omissions, and realize that humanity acts in its best interest given its best knowledge at the time it acts….

Nah. BIG OIL! BIG PHARMA! (Anything but BIG LAWYERS! BIG IDIOTS-DEMANDING-PUBLIC-POLICY AND BIG GOVERNMENT!)