A UK economics think-tank reports that special low tax rates on capital gains do not achieve their ostensible goal of encouraging investment in business. All they do is reduce the effective tax rate for people who are at least somewhat wealthy.

A film taints the name of a deceased female journalist by claiming she had sex with an FBI agent to get a scoop. The filmmakers cite no evidence for this accusation.

The act they accused would have been wrong because it would be bribery. Giving sex as a bribe is no more legitimate than giving money as a bribe.

The article ties this accusation with the tendency to call women "sluts" if they depart from strict chastity and modesty such as some repressive religions impose.

I have never called anyone a "slut" and I cannot imagine doing so. I somehow escaped absorbing the prevailing attitudes about who can or should have sex and when. I only became aware of those attitudes when I was in my 20s, and they were never accompanied by any reason to adopt it.

If "slut" means "someone who has sex too readily", then according to my understanding, in this society men are more likely to be sluts than women are. But the term is almost never applied to men.

If "slut" means "someone who has sex without affection", then I find it hard to understand why people want that, but I see no reason to criticize them for that preference. The article mentions a Chilean song (though it isn't really a song, as it has no melody) whose main point is to condemn the justice system's bias against rape victims and its tendency to excuse rape.

When it accuses thugs, prosecutors and judges of this bias, it is right.

But its chorus says, "You are the rapist." I take this to refer to men, and being one of them, I take offense. I am no rapist. How dare they accuse me (and every man, indiscriminately) of rape!

Falsely accusing someone of rape based on no evidence is just as scurrilous as falsely accusing someone of using sex as a bribe based on no evidence.

*The historical case for abolishing billionaires.*

They like to cite Adam Smith's "invisible hand", but he also warned about privilege for the rich.

I prefer to focus criticism on the system (plutocracy) that concentrates wealth and spreads poverty, rather than on the billionaires who are its extreme manifestation.

The US government, under Dubya and under Obama, lied to itself about the war in Afghanistan because the presidents and their cabinets preferred soothing falsehoods to painful truth.

"If we think our exit strategy is to either beat the Taliban — which can’t be done given the local, regional, and cross border circumstances — or to establish an Afghan government that is capable of delivering good government to its citizens using American tools and methods, then we do not have an exit strategy because both of those are impossible&helliip; We did not know what we were doing."

US citizens: call on all Democratic presidential candidates to end the US's broken for-profit medical system.