Tag Archives: war

Are inheritance taxes unfair? Many people think they are. "Why should I be taxed twice on money I've earned during my lifetime?" they say.  This is, of course, a fallacy. Dead people don't pay taxes. Living ones do. So inheritance tax is not double taxation of money the dead person earned while they were still alive. It is taxation of an unearned windfall for the people to whom they leave their assets, usually their children. Other forms of unearned income, such as interest on...

There has been a huge amount of analysis about the reasons why British people voted to leave the EU. Some of it is very good: some of it less so, saying more about the biases of the writers than it does about the motivations of the British (no, I won't link any of those posts here!). I confess, I have added to the literature myself. I leave it to you to judge into which of these categories my contributions fall.But in all the vast verbiage written on this topic, there appears to be a...

Image: NASA “How is this even a business?” my late father asked when I described a notional model for human space colonization. “How are you going to make money? What product are you going to sell?” Admittedly the model — developing a swarm of self-replicating , self-repairing decentralized, solar-powered construction automata and using them to mine asteroids and produce more such automata as well as habitable colonies— is not monetizable in the same fashion that building a picture-sharing...

In response to my post about the lessons of history, Claudia Dias sent me this clip from The Times, March 31st, 1939: Four months after Kristallnacht, and two weeks after Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia, the British government was still repatriating Jewish refugees. This group knew they were being sent back to almost certain death. No wonder they were hysterical.Today, refugees in Greece face deportation to Turkey, and from there probable repatriation to their own countries. If they...

Yesterday, at the final of the Kent Schools Public Speaking Competition, a young boy stepped up to the podium. "What have we learned from history?" he asked. "We have learned that no good comes from killing people". And he went on to speak eloquently, first of World War II: "There has never been another major war," he said.True, there has not. The uneasy peace of the Cold War did not descend into outright conflict, though it was a near thing: the world very nearly went up in nuclear flames...

Details here. People on the left: take careful note of this. Many neoconservatives may even desert the GOP for Hillary Clinton.Trump also caused hysterical outrage by the mere suggestion that maybe – just maybe – when running for US president he should display “neutrality” on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And now the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) – an organisation of neoconservatives and US evangelical Christians who think their ticket to heaven depends on Israel...

The world turns on its dark side......it is winter A Child of Our Time, Michael Tippett "Man has measured the heavens with a telescope, driven the gods from their thrones," proclaims the contralto at the start of Michael Tippett's wartime oratorio A Child Of Our Time. Like our counterparts before the dark time of which Tippett writes, we too believe that science leaves no place for religion. But religion endures, and when the world turns, it comes back in its most violent form, tearing...

I have no doubt that the vast majority of British people will support David Cameron’s decision to blow to smithereens two British jihadis fighting with the self-proclaimed Islamic State who were allegedly involved in planning and directing terrorist attacks on the UK, just as the vast majority of Americans support Obama doing similar things. I don’t think the Conservative government will harm its popularity in assassinating these people. The opposite, in fact, or as The Sun put it “Wham!...

In my last post, I pointed out that Greece's current depression is by no means the worst since World War II, as is often stated, and that the US's Great Depression was not the worst depression in history either. For reference, I'm putting up Tony Tassell's chart again.I'm frankly appalled by the comments on that post. The arguments used to justify the prevailing views amount to the following.1. The other countries in the list aren't rich Western countries, so they don't count.Eh???2....