Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Keen insight from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Sylvester Brown:

I’m convinced there isn’t a politician around today with the chutzpah to challenge the powerful Bush machine.

There should be. Especially now that President George W. Bush’s administration is besieged with allegations and scandal. Critics claim the president manipulated evidence in a rush to war while key members of his administration are under investigations for spitefully blowing the cover of a CIA agent. Then there’s the fact that more than 2,000 soldiers have died in a war that (according to recent polls) more than 60 percent of Americans feel has been mishandled. Heck, members of his own party are even circling wagons of self-preservation.

Must be that Muthra, Reid, Pelosi, Kennedy, Kerry, Leahy, ad al and et absurdum, just lack chutzpah. No, they’ve got chutzpah. Perhaps they just lack moxie.

Or their simplistic rhetorical backfilling falls upon American ears who understand principles or lack thereof.

Ask any QA or Project Manager, and they’ll agree. So will the St. Louis region as it tries to stomach hundreds of millions of dollars in tax overruns because Metrolink light rail feature creeped and people continued to tinker with design after the development began.

But it’s public money and public/private partnership, so nobody will get fired, which is the important thing.

If my home state needs me, I will serve in the invasion of Illinois. That is, if Wisconsin and Chicago have a war over water, my side is clear.

And just in case you wonder, I would have had to come down on the side of Kilbourntown in Milwaukee’s Bridge War because I’m from the northwest side.

Supervisors vote to require neutering of pit bulls, mixes:

San Francisco supervisors unanimously approved a set of ordinances Tuesday requiring the neutering or spaying of an estimated 7,000 pit bull terriers and pit bull mixes in the city.

The legislation, sponsored by Supervisor Bevan Dufty, also will set new restrictions on the breeding of pit bulls, requiring breeders to obtain a permit from the city. People found violating the requirement to have their dog neutered or spayed could be fined up to $1,000.

One must wonder if this particular law means all currently endowed male dogs must be disenfrankcized. One suspects, given how much respect San Francisco has for other tenets of the United States Constitution, that legal protections like ex post facto don’t apply there either.

Maybe None: Is having a child — even one — environmentally destructive?:

Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, an informal network of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth. Knight, whose convictions led him to get a vasectomy in the 1970s, when he was 25, believes that the human race is inherently dangerous to the planet and inevitably creates an unsustainable situation.

“As long as there’s one breeding couple,” he says cheerfully, “we’re in danger of being right back here again. Wherever humans live, not much else lives. It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.”

Knight’s position might sound extreme at first blush, but there’s an undeniable logic to it: Human activities — from development to travel, from farming to just turning on the lights at night — are damaging the biosphere. More people means more damage. So if fewer people means less destruction, wouldn’t no people at all be the best solution for the planet?

One could apply Knight’s sound–but hardly valid–logic to all of life itself, since every herbivore on the planet eats weeds and damages their life cycles, and every damn weed on the plant sucks nitrogen out of the soil and changes the environment.

Why stop at living processes? Why, rain erodes landmasses! Solar flares irradiate uninhabited planets! Novae char!

The only solution is to embrace nullity!

Anything less is inconsistency.

McCain: Pentagon spending ‘unsustainable’:

Republican Sen. John McCain Tuesday said the massive Pentagon budget for the war in Iraq can’t be sustained because of the need to replace weapons.

“We have unsustainable defense spending,” said McCain, a chief proponent of military acquisition reform. “Refurbishment or replacement sooner than planned is putting further pressure on DOD’s investment accounts. We cannot sustain the number of weapons programs that are in the program of record.”

However, Medicare spending and a new drug benefit are different. Whereas each dollar spent on a bullet or a bomb gets used up when that bomb or bullet is used up, each dollar of health tax dollars extends the life of someone who will need another dollar of tax dollars tomorrow.

The more they succeed, the more they cost. Unlike wars.