Happy Monday.

White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew repeatedly claimed yesterday that Senate Dems should be excused from not passing a budget in over 1,017 days because "[y]ou canÂ’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes." Not even WaPo's FactChecker could stomach that: "a budget resolution is one of the few things that are not subject to a filibuster. . . . You donÂ’t even need 50 votes, just a simple majority." Four Pinocchios.

I feel like we see some variation of "[global warming-related phenomenon] is less than expected" once a week. This week it's Himalayan snow, which was supposed to be disappearing at a rate of 50bn tonnes of meltwater each year. Not so, say scientists who, y'know, actually measured it.

Tabloid war-porn: the Brits seem awful pleased to be flown on a V-22 Osprey, courtesy of the U.S. Marines.

Car bombs in Georgia (the country) and India targeted Israeli embassies today. The bomb in Georgia was disarmed in time; the bomb in India injured at least one person.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:55 AM | Comments (166)
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 Announcing The CPAC Red Carpet Blogger Awards

So here are the Red Carpet blogger awards announced at CPAC 2012. And our favorite lil' ewok was not forgotten. But I guess he's a bit shy and didn't want to toot his own horn.

Since the award consists mostly of a warm feeling and a mounted hunk of metallized plastic, it'd sure be nice if you hit the tip jar and gave him something to really cherish.

2012 CPAC Red Carpet Bloggers Awards

1. Top Humor Blog - Iowahawk Blog

2. Best Writer on a Blog - Ace of Spades

3. Best News Blog:  The Right Scoop

4. Best Blog Links:  Instapundit

5. Best New Blog:  Naked DC

6. Best anti-Jihad Blog:  Atlas Shrugged

7. Best State-Level Blog:  The Shark Tank

8. Most Influential Blog:  Instapundit/Glenn Reynolds

9. Most Underrated Blog:  Legal Insurrection

10. Tea Party Blogger of the Year:  Gateway Pundit

11. Best Overall Blog: Hot Air

Most All of you probably are aware of Mr. Iowahawk (who has known to hang out on the ONT occasionally) and his masterful long-form satirical humor. But did you know that he also works in the under-140-characters short form category as well:

And that's how you become the top humor blog of the year.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:34 PM | Comments (709)
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Anybody got any good crackpot theories?

I come up with crackpot theories all the time. Not the paranoid bluster of people like truthers and birthers. Science theories. Science... crackpot... bluster. I know just enough about science to consider a wide array of things and not enough to eliminate anything. Perfect! I thought it might be interesting to see what kinds of ideas the people of the moron horde might come up with.

How about raising Venice?

The power of fracking machines is incredible. Fracking works by cracking open rock thousands of feet below with pressure applied from above. Beau coups pressure. Part of fracking involves injecting sand to hold open the cracks once the pressure is released. This gives hydrocarbons a path out of the production zone.

An idea occurred to me long ago while watching a show about sinking Venice. They could drill a several dozen injection sites all around the city. Once drilled, the sites could be made inconspicuous when the drills are removed. They could place powerful injection pumps at these sites. Instead of injecting massive amounts of water, inject sand and water. Tons of sand. Inject an entire desert of sand, slowly, over time. Sand holds up better than clays and would result in a porous, strong layer of sand through which water cold easily migrate. And in the case of Venice, you probably wouldn't even have to fracture rock--you know, rock-rock. Prolly just weak sedimentary rock.

On the surface, you would have disguised pump stations working 24 hours a day. They would draw water from the lagoon. Dump trucks full of sand would occasionally appear to keep the machines supplied. Most of the noise from the engines could be cleverly absorbed and/or shielded. If sound was still a problem, you could turn off the pumps when necessary, say, in the evenings.

Regardless, you could build up huge plumes of uncompressable sand at the injection point of each well. Over time, these would become large enough to raise the entire city out of the mud. This could be done evenly with computerized monitoring of city levels.

This seems like such a no-brainer, so I looked it up. I found an article at NatGeo where they were discussing injecting water only. Water? Yeah, that might work for a period of time, but it wouldn't be nearly as reliable as sand injection. Water moves around. And away eventually.

Imagine how much they could raise the city in ten years.

They could keep the wells in place turn them on and off as necessary for decades to come; after all, the the sinking clays around the sand plumes underground might require occasional puffing-up. After a while, the problem disappear completely.

If anyone knows why this wasn't started 30 years ago, let me know. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 01:20 PM | Comments (560)
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From The Guardian:

Greece's parliament was expected to defy angry protesters on the streets of Athens and endorse a deeply unpopular package of savage austerity measures in order to try to avoid a sovereign default and retain the euro as its currency.

With eurozone leaders declaring it was time for Greece to put up or shut up and that Athens' promises could no longer be believed, Greece's two main political parties and the caretaker prime minister invoked apocalyptic scenarios for the country if the €3.3bn (£2.76bn) of cuts ordained by the eurozone were not supported.

Street battles between police firing rounds of tear gas and demonstrators hurling firebombs and marble slabs left Syntagma Square, the plaza in front of the parliament building, resembling a war zone. Rubbish bins burned as plumes of smoke and asphyxiating clouds of toxic chemicals filled the air.

Another picture. They would rather burn the place down than give up the free EU money. Thanks to @BDomenech.

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Posted by: rdbrewer at 11:17 AM | Comments (234)
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Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters:

“Whoever gets elected now has a much better chance of being successful than Obama had,” Soros said.

This led Zakaria to stunningly ask completely out of the blue, “Will you create a Super PAC to help President Obama?”

. . .

Zakaria next asked, “Will you vote for President Obama?”

Video at the link.

Recall that Zakaria also advocated updating the Constitution. Question: Why does this person still have a job?

Added: Commenter "Mr. Pink" mentions that Zakaria advises President Obama. I had forgotten about that.

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Posted by: rdbrewer at 08:46 AM | Comments (393)
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I spent the last week's reading time catching up on my backlog -- I've bought far more books than I can possibly read in the coming year, so I've made a pact with myself not to buy any more until I finish reading the ones I have. This means that I must finally finish scaling the twin mountains of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Music and Paul Rahe's Republics Ancient and Modern.

However, sometimes all you want is a snack rather than a full meal, and I find that magazines fill that hole quite nicely. Sometimes I read them online -- as with articles from The Atlantic or City Journal, say -- but where most magazines are concerned I'm still an old-fashioned printed-paper partisan. I imagine that at some point the economics of publishing will push most magazines entirely onto the Web, but I'll be sorry to see this happen.

For example: I subscribe to a periodical called The Banjo Newsletter. It's one of those narrow-interest hobbyist magazines that have almost disappeared from the world of print. Part of the mag's charm is the format: printed on newsprint, and laid out for density of information rather than abstract esthetics. I love getting BNL in my mailbox every month. (Readers of a certain age may remember when computer magazines like Byte and Computer Shopper were in a similar niche.)

The same goes for The Fretboard Journal, but for different reasons. I refer to this glossy coffee-table magazine as "guitar porn", because it really is. It is a sumptuously photographed paean to stringed instruments; there are no snippets of sheet music or guitar tab or buy/sell classifieds here. It is a magazine dedicated to the art rather than the craft of stringed instruments, and the people who make and play them.

Mainstream magazine publishing since the 1970's has catered almost exclusively to women. As time goes by and tastes change, Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens gives way to Cosmopolitan and People, but the focus as always is heavily on the female demographic. Men still have a few slender beach-heads -- Guns and Ammo and The Shotgun News are still in print, as are the car mags -- but women comprise the bulk of magazine readership by far. (I don't think I'd count Maxim or GQ as men's magazines because, honestly, I don't know a single guy who reads either title. Maybe I just don't hang around the right crowd. And internet porn pretty much killed the skin-mag business.) Publishers are finding that even women are moving to web-based news, gossip, and home-making web sites, however, so it seems like the era of paper based magazines may be entering its twilight era.

A magazines complete their transition to the internet, I hope they maintain their periodical flavor rather than just turning into another interest-group blog with nicer photos. A magazine isn't the same as a special-interest website. There is an interplay between the words and pictures in a magazine, the thematic content of an issue, and even an esthetic comfort in a familiar layout. BNL may seem rather amateurish and old-fashioned to some, but I find the plain layout very pleasing.

Magazines are an area where tablet computers may finally come into their own, though at present only Apple with their iPad seem to be working to leverage the devices to their full potential in terms of magazines. HTML is simply not a particularly good technology for certain kinds of textual/visual layout, and I think magazines fall into that category. But both the hardware and software are evolving quickly, and I think this problem is on the cusp of being solved (with the addition of video content, which can really deepen the magazine experience if done right).
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Posted by: Monty at 06:20 AM | Comments (112)
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No more football until Fall. What's a severe conservative to do?

Posted by: andy at 03:22 AM | Comments (297)
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Hmmm. Just when you think you know a lot about World War II, something new comes out. This is pretty big and of course, our news folks here whistle right on by it. Secret Documents Lift Lid On WWII Mutiny By US Troops In North Queensland.

An Australian historian has uncovered hidden documents which reveal that African American troops used machine guns to attack their white officers in a siege on a US base in north Queensland in 1942.

Information about the Townsville mutiny has never been released to the public.

But the story began to come to light when James Cook University's Ray Holyoak first began researching why US congressman Lyndon B Johnson visited Townsville for three days back in 1942.

What he discovered was evidence detailing one of the biggest uprisings within the US military.

"For 70 years there's been a rumour in Townsville that there was a mutiny among African-American servicemen. In the last year and a half I've found the primary documentation evidence that that did occur in 1942," Mr Holyoak told AM.

Posted by: CDR M at 05:42 PM | Comments (744)
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Ron Paul supporters hardest hit.

The Ron Paul campaign had tried to lower expectations somewhat Saturday, alleging that the Romney campaign had been involved in some tricky business, and predicting that the results would be very close.

In particular, a senior Paul aide had suggested that the Romney campaign was involved in the cancellation of a caucus where Paul’s campaign had expected to do well. “It’s not completely insidious, but they knew we were going to swamp it up there,” said Paul campaign chairman Jesse Benton.

The state GOP said that the caucus was cancelled due to inclement weather.

For the record, I didn't participate in the caucus. The results are non-binding. When the Maine GOP decides to make itself relevant and move to an actual primary that awards delegates, I'll re-register as a Republican and cast a vote. Until then? Meh.

Posted by: Slublog at 03:35 PM | Comments (263)
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Hmm...

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Posted by: Ace at 01:18 PM | Comments (306)
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