Predictable Change is Good

Many people today are concerned about predictions of global warning. But why fear the change. If it can be reliably predicted, then lets prepare for the change, and enjoy it.

Our environment changes all the time. The more reliably we can predict the change, then we can adjust our plans and use the change for our advantage.

We accurately predict when it gets dark and light each day. What could be a bigger change than a world with light, and a world in darkness.  But we have all learned to live with day and night.

Many who live near the ocean use the prediction of the tides to plan their activities.

Most people who live in locations with seasons are able to accommodate big temperature changes from the high 90’s to below zero, even when they do not know precisely when the changes will occur.

Everyone is not wiped out by floods, hurricanes and lightning. Only those who do not take proper precautions suffer.

All those who are concerned about climate change should just prepare for it, rather than try to stop the inevitable.

 

 

FFF Except from Anthony De Jasay’s The State

The transition to socialism, in the sense of an almost subconscious, sleep-walking sort of “maximax” strategy by the state, both to augment its potential discretionary power and actually to realize the greatest possible part of the potential thus created, is likely to be peaceful, dull, and unobtrusive. This is its low-risk high-reward approach. Far from being any noisy “battle of democracy … to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state”; far from involving some heroic revolutionary break with continuity; far from calling for the violent putting down of the propertied minority, the transition to socialism would probably be the more certain the more it relied on the slow atrophy of initially independent, self-regulating subsystems of society. As their free functioning was constrained, the declining vitality of successive chunks of the “mixed economy” would eventually lead to a passive acceptance of a step-by-step extension of public ownership, if not to a clamour for it.

— Anthony de Jasay, The State [1985]

Will Common Sense Gun Control Stop Mass Shootings?

Trevor Burns Commentary October 2, 2015

America Is Not Japan, and ‘Common Sense’ Won’t End Mass Shootings

click here for full article

Except:

Mass shootings should not be the centerpiece of gun-control policy. Mass shooters are motivated, difficult to detect, and commit only a tiny fraction of gun violence in America. Pretending that stopping these psychopaths is a matter of passing “commonsense” laws is just moral grandstanding for cheap political points. If all that is keeping us from being mass-shooter-free is failure to heed the suggestions of Obama and other champions of “common sense,” then I invite them to try — and then to take personal responsibility for every one that they miss.

Passing effective gun-control policies in a nation brimming with 300 million guns is difficult; don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Have we come to accept that a certain amount of gun violence in our country is inevitable? The hard truth is that we have, just as we accept that deaths by automobile accidents, drowning in swimming pools, and industrial accidents are inevitable. This doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can or should do, but the first thing that we must do is to stop pretending that ending mass shootings is merely a matter of “common sense.”