HOW TO PREDICT YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY PAYOUT. If you’re 50 or under, try this methodology: Pick a number. Then subtract that number from itself. You’re done! For planning purposes, at least, I wouldn’t count on anything.

MEGAN MCARDLE: How Long Will US Debt Remain the Destination of Choice for Global Capital?

Not as long as we hope.

PETER WEHNER ON CIVILITY IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE: “In the last few days, it seems every third liberal columnist and commentator has taken to libeling the Tea Party Movement, referring to it as (take your pick) terrorists, suicide bombers, hostage takers, the Hezbollah faction of the GOP, traitors, nihilists, anarchists and people suffering from halitosis. (The last reference is made up; the rest of the descriptions are real.) Even a few politicians are getting into the act. . . . Why on earth would liberals do something like that? After all, they care– deeply care – about civility in public discourse. I know because they tell me that all the time. But perhaps I should amend that last statement. Liberals –not all of them but more than a few of them – tell us of their concern about civility in public discourse, but only when it works to their political advantage.”

Personally, I’m tired of hearing the whole have-you-no-decency routine from people who have made quite clear that they possess none themselves.

OBAMA’S 7 DEADLY SINS.

OVER 35,000 VIEWS for You’re Gonna Pay.

VOX DAY SAYS THAT these charts are scarier than the ones I linked earlier today. Is it the return of the Great Depression?

DUDE, I DON’T THINK YOU REALLY WANT THAT: Al Gore: We need an American ‘Arab spring’. Because, you know, if it happens you’ll be on trial in a steel cage. . . .

AT AMAZON, 50% or more off in Exercise & Fitness.

RADLEY BALKO: After 10 Years In Prison, Cory Maye Comes Home. I don’t think he should have served a day.

DISAPPOINT-MINT: “Breath mints packaged in a tin can poking fun at President Barack Obama have been pulled from the shelves at the University of Tennessee bookstore after local legislator Joe Armstrong told store officials he was offended by the mints.”

They told me if I voted for John McCain, we’d see creepy censorship of political humor. And they were right!

UPDATE: Reader Clifford Grout points out that Disappoint-Mints are being sold by The Nation.

SAVING MATT DAMON.

REVIEW: Skype App for iPad2.

HOW DEATH CAME to Charles Foster Harper.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: The Man Who Would Stop Time. “Bill Andrews has spent two decades unlocking the molecular mechanisms of aging. His mission: to extend the human life span to 150 years–or die trying.” Faster, please.

LOOKING FOR ALIEN LIFE. “Short on funds, one of SETI’s best instruments has gone dark. But scientists and amateurs alike still look (and listen) to the stars for evidence of life in the great beyond.”

OH, GOODY: Facial recognition software could reveal your social security number. “According to a new study which will be presented August 4 at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, technology has made it possible to identify and gain the personal information of strangers by using facial recognition and social media profiles like Facebook.”

However, I will be presenting a paper of my own offering an easy technological fix.

AT AMAZON, back-to-school essentials.

FASTER, PLEASE: New Process Could Make Canadian Oil Cheaper, Cleaner. “New technology for extracting oil from oil sands could more than double the amount of oil that can be extracted from these abundant deposits. It could also reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from the process by up to 85 percent. . . . Canada’s oil sands are a huge resource. They contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for decades.”

And it’s “ethical oil,” not “conflict oil.”

BIOFUELS AND global demand for food.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: What To Do If You Hate Your Job.

A MICROFLUIDIC CHIP for medical testing in remote regions.

A LONG WAY TO GO: Nissan Leaf sales hit 931, Chevy Volt at 125 in July.

MIKE HENDRIX AT COLD FURY IS ASKING FOR SOME HELP from readers. If you enjoy his blog, hit his tipjar. I donated.

JENNIFER RUBIN:

It’s almost hard to recall how the left howled about “civility” in the wake of the Tucson shooting horror. But that was then, and the standard the left sets for the right is one it hardly adheres to. We had Vice President Joe Biden’s now-denied comments casting Republicans in the role of “terrorists.” And then the hometown newspaper for liberal elites got into the act.

There’s no denying the depths — and hypocrisy — to which the New York Times opinion section has sunk. Remember that Paul Krugman carried on his own war of vilification, claiming Republicans were responsible for mass murder. As my colleague Charles Lane and the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto noted, another New York Times columnist decided to unleash his own noxious assault on the right. Yesterday Joe Nocera coughed up this bile on the Times’ op-ed page.

Charles Lane: Liberals Are In Deep Denial About Their Own Incivility Issues:

If liberals believe anything, it is that the right is either solely, or mostly, responsible for the degradation of political discourse in America. And they are surely correct to condemn such ugly rhetorical excesses as the Obama-is-Hitler placards that flowered across the land in the summer of 2009.

But liberals are in deep, deep denial about their own incivility issues. Consider the “terrorism” analogy now being aimed at the Tea Party by Democratic members of Congress — in the acquiescent presence of the vice president, no less — and by some journalists who sympathize with the Democrats. To pick just one example of the genre, today’s New York Times carries Joe Nocera’s column, “Tea Party’s War Against America.”

According to Nocera, President Obama’s debt-ceiling deal with the Republicans violated a basic rule: “Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.” He adds: “Much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” These “intransigent” spending cutters were indifferent to “blowing up the country” in pursuit of their goals. They are indifferent to “inflicting more pain on their countrymen” via “the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class” and the extra unemployment it will bring.

I’m puzzled. The Times editorial board only recently condemned “many on the right” for “exploit[ing] the arguments of division,” and “demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.” Right-wingers, The Times notes, “seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.”

So how can it be okay for Times columnists to demonize the Tea Party and try to persuade Americans that they are not just misguided, but the enemies of the people?

It’s all about the narrative. One needn’t be consistent, so long as one is consistent with the narrative.

UPDATE: More here. And readers point out that the Obama-is-Hitler stuff was mostly from Larouchies, who are hardly right wing.

DEREK THOMPSON: The 4 Scariest Economic Graphs I’ve Seen This Year.