Today in boring, unsurprising news: NPR continues its policy of misleading its listeners about how the US tax system works.

The latest fight between the president and Republicans is shaping up to be a battle royal — not only are taxes involved but so are deficits and class politics.

That's because the president wants to extend the cuts for one year, but only to those making less than $250,000. NPR's independent analysis shows Obama's proposal would add $3.2 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade, as opposed to $3.9 trillion if the tax cuts were extended to everyone, like Republicans want.

That is not how it works.

The tax cut Obama wants to extend would apply to everyone, regardless of income. The proposed tax increase would only apply to those who make more than $250,000, and would only affect income greater than $250,000.

Why should anyone trust NPR's analysis if, as it seems, NPR doesn't understand what they are analyzing?

Sadly, MSNBC is no better:

And today, Obama makes his first chess move in this new tax-cut battle: At a White House at 11:50 am ET, the president will call for a one-year extension of the tax cuts for ONLY those making less than $250,000.

"ONLY" !

DERP!

Frankly, I'm more surprised by the amount of interest people have taken in the process by which the decision was made than I am by the fact that, within a closed group of people, there are cliques, politicking, conflicting ideologies, and bruised egos.

It feels like people assumed the Justices are black-robed Vulcans, dispensing cold, logical Truth when asked to, and not people who are subject to all the frailties and faults of every other human who has ever existed.

But, I'm playing Grumpy Old-ish Man today, so pay no attention to me.

Today's cover of USA Today:

We feed the war machine $22,000 every second, and it is never satisfied. "Feed me!" it cries out to us. "I bring you so many jobs. I keep you safe from the enemies I create for you. I give you the power to never have to say you're sorry. Feed me."

Matthew Baldwin @ defective yeti has done something fun:

I created the @textadventurer twitterbot to help myself learn the Twitter API. Originally it did nothing but tweet Zork commands, taken from a walkthrough. I was its sole follower.

Oddly, I really enjoyed seeing the text adventurer wander through my twitter feed every hour or so. And when he would tweet, say,”go north”, I would find myself curious as to where he was headed. So I eventually created the companion account @zork_i, rebooted @textadventurer, and introduced them to one another. Now they are playing out Zork I in its entirety.

Hilarious.

It almost makes me want to see what Twitter is like.

Republicans successfully overrode Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto of a fracking bill during a dramatic vote taken just after 11 p.m. Monday.

But like the legislation itself, the vote to override was controversial.

Rep. Becky Carney, a Democrat from Mecklenburg County who opposes fracking, pushed the wrong button and accidentally voted with Republicans to override the veto. A maneuver by Wake County Republican Paul “Skip” Stam prevented her from changing her vote, giving the GOP a historic one-vote margin of victory.

Personally, we're quite possibly fracked. We're moving to one of the counties where fracking is likely to happen. And, we'll be on well water. If our water proves flammable, I'll be sure to post pix!

Statewide, we're all fracked.

At least she's sorry for what she's done.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission — a federally-funded organization — conducted a special survey last year from June 17- July 17 and found that 65 percent of all fireworks injuries occurred within the month of the July 4th holiday.

ZOMG!! Government run amok!

Composite of 66 images

Of course, the study was actually done in order to collect and assess the data on firework-related injuries, in order to help hospitals and public safety organizations deal with said injuries.

But the story isn't any fun, that way - which, I suppose, is why they refuse to let me point this out, in the comments at the first link.

Last month, I started watching the last three seasons of The Wire on my PC. I got a VGA cable and sent the video output from my little netbook to my new receiver (which I bought specifically because it has a VGA input). But, my netbook would only do standard def, and iTunes would do this thing where it would play the video for ten minutes or so then the video would stall, and after a second or two the audio would go silent. After a few seconds, the video would resume, but in fast forward, to catch up where the clock said it should be. Then the audio would return. And it would do this three or four times per episode. Annoying.

So, I did what every normal person would do: I bought a new laptop. I bought a decent model, with pretty good specs, dual core, HD display, etc.. That improved the picture immensely. But, the video stalls still happened. And they were worse, once we started watching Breaking Bad, which is in HD.

OK, maybe it's a network issue. Maybe the videos are stalling because the power-line network connection to the NAS where they reside is too slow to keep up with the display. So, I copied one of the files to the laptop's HD. Nope, I still got the video stalling.

Nothing useful turned up when Googling, but lots of other people report the same issue when using iTunes.

As an experiment, I bought one of the Breaking Bad episodes from Amazon's streaming service. It worked fine. Streaming from Amazon gave better results - better picture quality and no video stalls - than locally-hosted iTunes files. Problem solved.

But what the fuck is wrong with Apple that they can't get iTunes to play local videos on brand new hardware without annoying stalls, while streaming the same video through a Flash-based plugin works fine?

So, now we're onto Game Of Thrones, on Amazon. iTunes can suck it.

Better Call Saul!

What is a Derecho?

...is not ready for release.