theDrahos

The bankrupt and shameful U.S. foreign policy is shown by its many own-instigated slaughters as in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and the Gulf War. U.S. sanctions on Iraq and the 2003 war that the U.S. initiated brought about more slaughter. The U.S. supported NATO and itself bombed in both Yugoslavia and Libya. Even more recently, the U.S. role is to support the slaughters begun and carried out by other governments by supplying aid, intelligence, weapons, training, bombs, and military support services. It stood firmly with Israel’s attacks on Gaza. At present it is supplying critical support to Saudi Arabia’s attacks on … Continue reading →

Federal tax receipts are approaching 17.5% of GDP. Whenever the percentage gets this high, a recession follows. That’s the bad news. What’s the good news? The percentage rarely gets above this, and when it does, there is a recession. Receipts fall. This means that the federal government cannot get above 20%. It can borrow to get spending above 20%, and it is doing this. But federal tax receipts have a ceiling in the United States. We are close to that ceiling. This is a major restraining factor on the federal government. McLellan has provided two informative charts. I regard these … Continue reading →

Sugar and carbohydrates are the real culprits in the obesity epidemic – and the public has been falsely told that couch potato lifestyles are to blame, a new report has claimed. Writing in the British Journal Of Sports Medicine, they said poor diet now generates more disease than physical inactivity, alcohol and smoking combined. The editorial, by a group of cardiologists and sports experts, says that while obesity has rocketed in the past 30 years there has been little change in physical activity levels. “This places the blame for our expanding waistlines directly on the type and amount of calories … Continue reading →

A British chess grandmaster infuriated women when he claimed that they are not “hard-wired” to play the game well, instead praising his wife’s ‘emotional intelligence’. Gender aside, how does your brain fare when you’re faced with a series of puzzles that require pure logic and reasoning? Take the Quizz .

Much of the push to raise minimum wages centers on the assumption that each individual worker should be paid an amount that allows the worker to purchase food, health care, transportation, and housing based on that one wage alone. In many cases, the living wage claims extend to the claim that each worker — or two adult workers, in some cases — should be able to support a family of four or more. Unfortunately, the “solution” to this challenge generally proffered these days is the minimum wage, which as we have seen here, here, here, and here, only serves to … Continue reading →

Many years back, a relative in India was trying to transfer a property that he had bought. He had failed to offer a bribe, had rubbed the fragile ego of a bureaucrat the wrong way, and now an inked-note on the file was pre-empting the transfer. The bureaucrat was enjoying a certain kind of pleasure from making my relative run around in desperation. To hurry things up, my relative decided to take help of a Minister in the government. To my utter surprise, the three of us went to the bureaucrat—I had thought the bureaucrat would come to the Minister’s … Continue reading →

While in Dublin recently I read an article in the newspaper about the Greek crisis. It was in the Irish Times and was very serious. The author, the well-known economic journalist Martin Wolf, asked a series of questions about the crisis and then answered them.  For example he asked whether the crisis was the fault of the Greeks, to which his answer was no: Nobody was forced to lend to Greece. Initially, private lenders were happy to lend to the Greek government on much the same terms as to the German government. Yet the nature of Greek politics… was no … Continue reading →