My Quiet Life

Rich on the CBO tax report:

Everybody is paying less in taxes under the new tax laws. But the high income tax payers are accounting for a higher portion of total income tax receipts. It has to be one of two things. Either there are more people in the top 20%, or the top 20% is recording more income. In other words, we’re creating wealth.

That conclusion doesn’t logically follow, and I’m going to use this as an excuse to try to give an explanation for the ramifications of the Bush tax cuts and the CBO report on their effects.

Rich seems to overlook that we have a tax structure in brackets — taxes for everyone can decrease across the board while the “share” still increases and decreases for different brackets. Which is precisely what happened, as we see in the breakdown by quintile:

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I am currently reading Full Spectrum Disorder, Stan Goff’s latest, which was written, presumably, before and during the beginning of this latest Iraq war. I’ll get around to a full review when I’m finished, but I wanted to quote a bit that is quite prescient:

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Peter Saint-Andre notes:

Not many people have heard of Volity yet. It’s a platform (largely based on XMPP) for building and playing multiplayer games over the net. It seems that the Volity folks are trying to do file transfer over XMPP in some creative, er, non-standard ways. Why not use JEP-0096? We don’t write these specs for fun, ya know. ;-)

Volity was first introduced to me by Doug and it looks pretty cool.

More generally, I am glad to know about JEP 0096. A lot of jabber client developers implement file transfer with XMPP via out-of-band connections, which for all intents and purposes is completely useless for the 95% of the world that is behind NAT/firewalls (not to mention endlessly confusing and frustrating). Further, in my opinion, the current inability to send files is one of the biggest weaknesses in Jabber.

XMPP client developers, take note: JEP 0096 is your friend!

This is the sort of reporting in the media that I can’t stand:

The letter signed by pro-Bush veterans said they were angry that he had never apologized for saying that U.S. troops had committed atrocities in Vietnam. Kerry has said those comments were taken out of context and that he had been quoting what veterans had told him.

No. That the comments were taken out of context and that he was quoting other veterans isn’t “what kerry has said” — it’s the god damn truth. It’s on the congressional record.

The whole thing is on the internet. You can go read it right now.

Reporting the verifiable truth as “what Kerry has said” in the face of these idiotic, slanderous lies is traitorous to the truth and any sense of journalistic integrity. But hey, it’s CNN, so what do you want.

Honestly, I could give two shits how far from Cambodia Kerry was on Christmas, or whether or not he got shot at while pulling someone out of the water. But when people start criticizing Kerry’s role in campaigning for the end of the Vietnam War, I get a little sensitive. It’s a part of our country’s legacy that should not be forgotten, and one of the few things I actually like about Kerry.

In related news, Arthur Silber links to my posts on the WSI (which seem to be garnering a lot more attention now, for obvious reasons) in his essay, which manages to weave seamlessly from “hot saucing” child discipline to Kerry and the Vietnam War.

Well, we just saw Napoleon Dynamite. There’s 82 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. It was awful.

It struck me as a Rushmore rip-off by someone that didn’t grasp why Rushmore was funny — that you weren’t supposed to be laughing at the main character, but with him.

cars.about.com has some dumb article listing the “top 10 cars for women”:

Women tell us they prefer a car that’s agile, easy to park, with good visibility.

Because men, as we know, prefer cars that are slow and cumbersome, impossible to park, and have low visibility.

They like to sit higher and rightly insist on storage for purses.

Okay, I’ll give them this one, because while Amanda is learning to drive, we’ve had trouble figuring out where to put her purse while I’m in the passenger seat.

Low price and running costs are important for working women.

.. but not for men. Nope. Men like to pay at lot and keep paying, for no reason.

Space for growing families is essential in many cases and safety is a major factor.

While men don’t actually have families, if they did, they would definitely prefer a car in which any minor accident would result in their prolonged, fiery death. Isn’t gender funny like that?

Good times. Stay tuned for the “Top 10 Cars for Black People”.

Some albums I have been enjoying lately:

Rufus Wainwright, Want One
Rufus Wainwright, Poses
Destroyer, This Night

I would link to allmusic, but it has ceased to exist as far as I am concerned.

posterchildren.com is totally broken in Opera. I wonder if they know.

This whole “christmas in cambodia” thing has to be one of the stupidest smear attempts I’ve ever read, and yet another reason why reading instapundit’s partisan buffoonery should be avoided. But since I accidentally did, let me now quote Kevin Drum, who puts this one to bed:

So let me get this straight. Kerry did go to Cambodia — even though that was supposedly impossible, he did take CIA guys in — even though that was supposedly absurd, and he did get a hat from one of them — even though that was supposedly a sign of mental instability. The extent of Kerry’s malfeasance is that instead of doing it in December, he actually did it in January and February.

Considering that he’s mentioned this story only twice, most recently 18 years ago, and it turns out that his only crime is to have tarted it up with a bit of holiday pathos, I think I’ll pass on following it any further down the Swift Vets rabbit hole. But thanks to everyone who displayed their deep unseriousness about this election by participating in this smear. It will be remembered.

Bill Hobbs quotes Jeff Cornwall on the CBO report, possibly quoting this NRO piece? Or was he the original author, maybe?

Anyways, the post says:

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