Links and Minifeatures 12 26 Monday

Michael Yon makes an excellent point about propaganda. Everything you see that was selected by someone can be viewed as propaganda for their point of view. Sometimes propaganda is pretty much true and accurate, at other times it can be true but a horrible misrepresentation, still others any relationship between it and truth is coincidental. But just because it's propaganda doesn't mean it's wrong.

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As a public service announcement, may I state that this article on bankrate, Extra year-end mortgage payment could cut tax bill is flatly wrong by what I know of the tax code. What it looks like they are trying to do is jam 13 months of interest into twelve. However, according to my understanding, the current deduction in the actual code has to do with interest accrued to the bank. They accrued so much interest for the 365 days in 2005. They are not going to give you a 1098 for an amount higher than that. You didn't pay more than that. You may have paid some of your 2006 interest early, but this has precisely zero effect upon your 2005 taxes, as the banks are on accrual method. The IRS is not going to give you credit for the money in the year before the bank pays taxes on earning it. This is a good way to get in trouble. One more example of paying attention to journalists who have no clue getting you in trouble.



(And it was front page on the search engine, too. Lots of suckers out there.)



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Carnivals:



Best of Me Symphony



Carnival of Personal Finance. Recommended: fivecentnickel.com (detailing a phishig scam), A Financial Revolution (a short term phenomenon, but still useful)



Carnival of the Capitalists



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"A implies B, B implies C, then a miracle happens, D implies E"



That's the kind of argument TPM Cafe makes. It goes straight from identification as possibly terrorist involved and proceeds direct from there to automatically picking them all up for coercive interrogations. Okay, if they were going straight from monitoring programs picking up possible terrorists to hauling all such persons in for maximum toughness questioning, I'd be concerned, but they don't even do that with murder suspects. More likely, all hitting a false positive does is monitor more conversations and get a human involved. Small point, and easy to gloss over, but we haven't seen any indication that those identified get brought straight in for waterboarding. Furthermore, he assumes that the false positive bias is identical to the false negative bias, something that anyone involved in statistics and sampling knows methods of correcting.



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Armies of Liberation details the state of corruption in Yemen





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Kesher Talk asks: "Does anyone know what you are supposed to do if you get a feedback from Trackbacks that "You are pinging trackbacks too quickly." Is there a fix for that? Or just wait and trackback later on?"



As far as I know, other than trackback later, not really. This is a relatively new anti-trackback spam feature that needs a little more work. The difficulty is that Haloscan (and other) systems are making the assumption that any time there are multiple trackbacks from a post, it's obviously from a splog, not realizing that the originating post does reference both. This is a real issue for folks running carnivals, for instance, and while Powerblogs does auto discovery for me, it hits my "Links and Minifeatures" every time, so if I'm dead set on sending a trackback (rare), I have to come back with a manual one later.