The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Author: mongreldogs

  • Stabilizing US Debt

    Everyone says they could balance the budget if they were in charge.  Few understand what would be involved.  I just played a neat simulator that actually allowed me to explore what different policies would do.

    US debt stabilizationUnfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to post the results, but I did a screen-capture hatchet job:

    US debt pathClick for a full view.  My choices — like anyone’s — probably wouldn’t please everyone but I don’t think they’re monstrous.  A guiding principle was to avoid adding much new until the current spending is more under control.  In reality, I know that government should be countercyclical, so this set of choices might actually be less than wise.  But it was still a good thought experiment.

  • Brilliant remix of the Dark Knight Trailer…

    … using footage from — amazingly! — the Toy Story franchise!

    via Ezra Klein

  • Even better visualization of Facebook’s vanishing privacy

    This (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) is an animated illustration of how Facebook has been increasingly defining your personal data as “open to everyone”.

  • Facebook’s vanishing privacy

    The EFF has an excellent timeline of the changes in the privacy policy at Facebook.  It’s worth a read for anyone who might consider Facebook either (a) private in any sense or (b) ethically reliable in any sense.  These changes bother me less than other people because I’ve always assumed Facebook would screw us over on privacy, so I treat it like a big virtual billboard+skywriting.

  • A fantastic visual response to “Show us your papers” in AZ…

    An editorial cartoon responding to the Arizona immigration law
    An editorial cartoon responding to the Arizona immigration law

    From the cartoonist Lee Judge ( http://media.kansascity.com/images/cartoons/judge/04-2010/judge_04272010_700.jpg)

  • How to Lie with the Truth — and how to counter it

    A meme spreading like wildfire throughout the rabid right is that “47% of Americans don’t even pay federal income tax.”  Clearly it’s time for another tax cut for the uber-wealthy in the interest of “fairness”.

    David Leonhardt wrote a piece in today’s New York Times exploring this.  Short version:  The number is true… and meaningless.  The working class pays far more in total taxes (once payroll, state, and sales tax is included).  People aren’t getting a free ride.  The article is worth a read, if only as an example of a calm, fact-based response to overheated breathless propaganda.

  • 16,500 : a “mistake” so egregious as to be a lie

    Where did the rabid right get the figure of 16,500 new “IRS agents” that (they claim) will be required to enforce the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act?

    They made it up.

    Really.  It came from nowhere.  In fact, the IRS will add few or no agents, and perhaps hardly any staff at all.  There’s a really nice dissection of this ludicrous claim over at factcheck.org.  Basically, the number was invented based on a bad estimate, inflated through dubious assumptions, and then just hand-waved into fact.

    Just remember, the next time someone quotes to you some scary scary provision of the ACA: There’s a non-negligible chance that they are lying or repeating a lie.

  • Deep pondering

    Does this story serve to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican Party’s self-proclaimed credentials as the “party of family values” (in that the RNC paid for an evening at “a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”)?  Or does it serve to expose the hypocrisy of the equally fictional Republican claim to being the “party of fiscal responsibility” (in that the RNC apparently can’t say how such an egregious expenditure slipped past their checks)?

    One for the ages, I suppose.  But I suspect the media will drop the story after today (to the limited extent they carried it at all), because it’s the RNC and not the DNC…

  • Comment of the Day

    There’s a thread at Lawyers, Guns, and Money linking to another story about some people who want to see “Confederate ancestry” recognized as a legitimate group for ethnic protection, and who are using Box 19 of the Census to do it.   Commenter kommrade reproductive vigor says:

    I guess I’m supposed to fill in Confederate Southern American (3/5ths).

    Which, when you think about, nicely punctures that argument…

  • Quote of the Day

    From a comment on Political Animal, in a thread about a brick-thrower who wants to “end socialism and the government takeover”, and has time to do so because he’s receiving disability checks from the government.  In describing the futility of explaining this contradiction to the brick-thrower, a commenter pointed out,

    You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

    And that is the actual greatest threat to the Republic today: The noisy whiners who don’t know anything factual and are proud of it.  How does an Enlightenment democracy function, when one side denies the value of both logic and evidence?