I don’t like guns or the idea of owning guns for ‘protection’. Gun ownership delivers a Prisoners’ Dilemma where there is a collective loss in legal law-abiding welfare and where ownership increases the stakes in planned criminal acts. Having more than a few punch-ups is socially preferred to having only a few killings. You buy a gun to ‘protect’ yourself and others buy guns because you own a gun. And crazy male psychopaths/libertarians buy guns because they fear that they have excessively small testicles, a problem that (fortunately) doesn’t trouble me. I am a carnivore but I question the intrinsic reasonableness of killing animals for ‘sport’ so I treat hunters as rather ugly people. Continue reading Guns in America
Again a retrieved post – thanks Christina. Continue reading Car speed & death
Kevin Rudd couldn’t make it to the State funeral of Labor legend John Button yesterday. He was visiting Cate Blanchett and her newborn baby in hospital. Cate will make it to the ‘ideas summit’ just 6 days after giving birth to her third child even though Rudd told her not to attend if she ‘didn’t [...]
Overworked and underpaid, yes, but at least I am still alive.
*An Aussi [...]
Another week disappears as 2007 gets devoured – time passes quickly as we age since each year is a smaller fraction of our life so far. Yet our discount rates decline – we become less impulsive. This is the reason that the initiation of destructive drug-taking is concentrated among kiddies and the reason some of us [...]
I watched the Four Corners show Final Call last night. It concerned the euthanasia debate and the right of elderly citizens to suicide when they feel their lives are not worth living.
The elderly people interviewed impressed me with the care of their planned exits and with their resolve to achieve this final act of self-determination. [...]
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